Tossing Out a Brick to Attract Jade

“Let me guess, Daozhang,” Xue Yang said.

He was sitting on the least comfortable of the coffin-benches out in the coffin home yard, which did at least have the advantage of catching the earliest rays of sunlight in the morning—and catching Xiao Xingchen, too, when he rose before dawn to start chores or meditate or whatever he did, while Xue Yang and the little blind were still asleep. This morning, Xue Yang had woken up earlier than normal and sat out here to wait for him. His bones were creaking now, but it had been worth it.

Above him, Xiao Xingchen’s face twisted in the helpless way it did when he was trying to find a way out of being rude. Xue Yang wondered if he knew he did that. Back when they’d first met, the Bright Moon and Gentle Breeze hadn’t been much of a one for hesitating or apologising at all. Perhaps this was a new expression on those noble features.

“My friend,” he started unhappily.

“I know, I know,” Xue Yang interrupted. “You don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not gonna make you, Daozhang, don’t worry.” He had the hem of Xiao Xingchen’s wide sleeve between his fingers—just enough to draw him in by, to keep him aware of his friend’s physical presence. “Just let me guess. You don’t even have to tell me if I’m right, if you don’t want to.”

He would, though, Xue Yang was sure.

“I suppose,” Xiao Xingchen said, and Xue Yang rewarded him by running his right hand up the edge of the greying, fraying silk until he could take Xiao Xingchen by the wrist. Not by the fingers—they hadn’t reached that point, yet, in their slowly increasing intimacy with one another—just a loose grasp around the knobby bone there, as if he were leading a friend somewhere. Xiao Xingchen, of course, blind though he was, was convinced of his own independence. You couldn’t lead him anywhere. You had to make him think it was his own idea.

“Daozhang is such a talented swordsman,” Xue Yang started, watching for Xiao Xingchen’s smile at his exaggerated praise. “Truly a prodigy of a kind unknown in the world before. Perhaps he bargained his eyesight for his impressive martial skills.”

Xiao Xingchen’s mouth folded at the corners, suppressing a laugh. It was a stupid expression that for some reason looked pretty on him. He made a gesture of denial. “How could that be? If this poor cultivator has any skills worth mentioning, it’s only because of my teacher.”

Conventional words, but he meant them, Xue Yang could tell. As if no one had ever told him that that kind of manners was just for show.

Xiao Xingchen dipped his head and, just like that, the joke was over, the smile fallen off his face. Did he miss that shifu of his so much? He should have stayed on her mountain, then, doing just as much good as he’d managed down here.

“Well, in that case…” He resisted the urge to swing Xiao Xingchen’s hand from side to side as he thought, like the little blind.

Truth be told, he didn’t care, exactly, what had happened to Xiao Xingchen’s eyes. It had been a stroke of luck for him and a fucking good joke, if nothing else, that such a high-and-mighty self-appointed hero had been brought down this way. What Xue Yang wanted to know was, what had happened to Song Lan after he’d left him sobbing in the dirt, vitreous humour foaming between his eyelids?

He had his own theories, of course. Getting the noble Xiao Xingchen to admit that his zhiji had mutilated him out of revenge would be the sweetest treat he’d had in his life, but it would take more than a morning’s work, for sure.

Xiao Xingchen was starting to pull back his hand, uncertainty playing across his face.

“Dog bite,” Xue Yang said quickly.

“Dog bite?” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “How would that… work?”

“Um. Two very small, hungry dogs?”

“Two very small, hungry dogs,” Xiao Xingchen repeated thoughtfully, “with extremely precise bites.”

“Narrow jaws,” Xue Yang agreed. “You can breed dogs to look all kinds of ways. Long, narrow jaws would be easy.”

“Two specially-bred, but nonetheless very hungry, small dogs bit out my eyes. Presumably while I was lying on the ground, not trying to avoid them—so when I was asleep?”

“Daozhang is known for napping indiscriminately,” Xue Yang said solemnly, because it was a rare thing if he managed to catch Xiao Xingchen sleeping.

They slept side-by-side on the broken-down bed in the coffin house, but he was up every morning before sunrise like a bloody Lan, and sometimes in the night as well. Xue Yang would be woken by cold air leaking in under the ragged blanket and get up to find him sweeping the dust across their packed-earth floors, or setting rice to soak, or attempting to fix the wobbly leg of their busted-up table, like a perversely helpful ghost. Was that a blind thing, or a Xiao Xingchen thing? A-Qing didn’t seem to have any trouble snoring away till daybreak.

“It’s a good guess,” Xiao Xingchen said, “but it wasn’t a dog bite.”

Smiling again, he shook his wrist free of Xue Yang’s hand. The overcast sky behind his head was almost bright by now, and Xue Yang realised he’d been squinting to make out Xiao Xingchen’s shadowed features. He blinked firmly a couple of times and stood up so he could look him in the face more comfortably.

“Since you’re up, too,” Xiao Xingchen was saying, “come down to the river with me. Two can carry back twice as much water.”

“Sure you want me taking up your early-morning time to yourself, Daozhang?” he asked—as if he’d let him get away that easily. They were already moving together across the coffin home’s courtyard, to the corner where their wooden pails stood empty, a couple of bamboo carrying poles propped up next to them.

“Oh, it is still early,” Xiao Xingchen murmured to himself. Louder, he added, “Your company is always welcome, friend.”

They took the little path down to the river, the one Xue Yang hated walking down with any kind of load. It was narrow and overgrown, probably hadn’t been a path at all before A-Qing started poking around out here with her stick and discovered a shortcut to the water. (He didn’t know for sure that she’d fallen in, but there’d been one evening a few months back when she’d shown up damp from the chest down, skirt and jacket creased from being wrung out, and got touchier than usual when he asked about it—so he liked to think she’d slipped and splashed into the shallows arse-first.) The worst part was that it was steeper than the long way round. His broken-and-reset leg ached every time he got to the water’s edge, and then he had to go back up.

There were brambles growing opportunistically across the narrow empty space they’d cleared, traipsing up and down the slope.

“Careful—” he started to warn Xiao Xingchen, turning his head back to look at him, and then broke off with a spray of curses. An unseen stem had caught him across the face, thorns raking blood out of his cheek and jaw.

“Fucking weeds,” he spat, and flicked Jiangzai out of his sleeve to shred all the stalks he could see. The sword flew so swiftly that sliced-off leaves followed in her wake. Normally he was more circumspect with her around Xiao Xingchen, but he was angry now. “Forget dogs—this is probably what happened to you! Walked into a fucking thornbush and just got both eyes ripped out!”

Behind him, Xiao Xingchen was setting down his pole and buckets, reaching out with his bare hands towards Xue Yang. “Are you hurt? My friend, let me help you,” he called.

They weren’t deep cuts, but Xue Yang had pulled them wider by snarling. He sheathed Jiangzai in his qiankun sleeve, hoping that the green smell of spilled sap would cover the faint resentful energy she trailed.

“It’s just a scratch, Daozhang, don’t worry,” he said, even as Xiao Xingchen’s cool fingertips reached his face and gently felt for the damage. It felt kind of nice, actually, so he let him keep going. One good thing about his convalescence had been letting the fine daozhang dirty his hands with Xue Yang’s blood and never know whose it was. Although he’d soaked himself in so much other blood by now, there was still a simple pleasure to this.

Qi fizzed between them as his skin knitted itself back together. He’d have expected Xiao Xingchen to have some admonishing words for him about his temper, or the right of stupid plants to grow across their path. Instead, the daozhang just cocked his head to one side, forehead slightly wrinkled above the tight white bandage across his face, as he cupped Xue Yang’s cheek to check there was no injury he’d missed. Funny, that he still made the expression of taking a closer look when all the looking he was doing was with his hands, and he wasn’t even fully facing him.

“Thanks,” he said at last, breaking the moment.

Xiao Xingchen pulled back. “Thank you for clearing the way,” he said wryly, and stepped backwards to pick up the pole again.

They reached the river without any further accidents. At the water’s edge, Xue Yang took Xiao Xingchen’s pails without a word. He slung one pole across each of his shoulders and used his qinggong to take a long, gliding step to the pointed rock that stood up just where the water got deep enough to quickly fill the buckets. That was harder and hurt more, these days, than it had before he’d been left for dead by the Jin, but it was coming back, little by little.

“Thank you,” Xiao Xingchen tried to say again, when he set down lightly on the dry gravel and handed back half his load, but Xue Yang didn’t let him finish.

“Please, there’s no need,” he said, laying a hand on Xiao Xingchen’s upper arm, just underneath the bamboo pole he was steadying on his shoulder. He looked so slender a breeze would knock him down, and he was thinner than he’d been when he was chasing Xue Yang like a dog across three provinces, but there was muscle there too, and meridians still rushing with honestly-cultivated qi.

They started back up the wretched path, cut stems slipping beneath their boots.

“If Daozhang truly wanted to thank me,” he said, when the edge of the woods and the grey sky over the coffin home were finally visible, “he could always confirm my guess earlier.”

“Hmm? Which guess?”

“About the thornbush,” he said with a smile in his voice. Xiao Xingchen probably wouldn’t even remember he’d said that, in amongst his other profanities. Maybe he’d even forgotten his friend pressing on that sensitive spot, with a curiosity he was too restrained ever to indulge himself. You’d have to have a pretty selective memory to make it through the world as naïve as Xiao Xingchen had.

“Oh.”

Silence, for a while. They reached the cartwheel-scored track that stretched past their home, between a nothing village—now even more of a nothing, thanks to Shuanghua—in one direction and the gate of Yi City itself in the other. Not expecting another response, Xue Yang indulged himself with the image of Song Lan getting his vengeance on his former friend. It was a picture he’d been building in his mind’s eye for a while, now, and one with enough variations to keep him entertained well into the future. Had the Distant Snow and Cold Frost used Fuxue’s point to burst the eyeballs in Xiao Xingchen’s head, or had he got close enough to prise them out with his thumbs? Had Xiao Xingchen thought it was a friendly or even a loving touch, Song Lan’s fingertips tracing his features the way he no longer could by sight, before realisation had bloomed with the pain?

“It wasn’t a thornbush,” Xiao Xingchen said suddenly.

Xue Yang stopped so sharply that water shot over the rims of his buckets and onto the dusty ground. “No?” he asked, after far too long a pause.

“I,” Xiao Xingchen said, and stopped again. He looked like a marble statue, his jaw tight and his free fist clenched at his side, but the water in the pails he was carrying jumped and shivered as though an earthquake was building.

“Daozhang, you don’t have to—” Xue Yang said, closing the gap between them and reaching out left-handed—whether to steady the bamboo pole or the man, he wasn’t sure.

“No, I want to,” Xiao Xingchen said. “I gave them away.”

His face didn’t change, once he’d spoken. Was that all he was going to say? Xue Yang hesitated again. He could smell the tears rising in Xiao Xingchen’s eye sockets, a butcher-shop aroma that was beginning to smell like home to him, though there were no tell-tale blotches on his bandage yet. Better get him inside their courtyard, at least, if he was going to cry or collapse. Nobody else needed to see this.

“Daozhang is generous beyond measure,” he said, because Xiao Xingchen’s friend wouldn’t push for more answers right now. Or would he?

“Hah.” It wasn’t really a laugh, not like he was used to hearing from Xiao Xingchen. “No. I’m really not.”

Then he shook his head and strode forwards to their gate, leaving Xue Yang staring witlessly after him. He lowered his hand—his left hand, what had he been thinking?—and scrambled to follow.

By the time he caught up with Xiao Xingchen, he was conversing with A-Qing through the coffin home door, the little blind trying to sound as if she was dressed and ready for the day when she’d clearly only just woken up.

“I have a headache,” Xiao Xingchen said when she’d stopped her warbling, his voice calm and steady. “I’m going to lie down again for a little while. Please don’t make too much noise, either of you.”

All right, then. Xue Yang would spend the rest of his morning reminding A-Qing to shut up with gleeful justification, and preparing his appearance at their bedroom door with a pot of tea just when Xiao Xingchen needed it. He wasn’t going to mention the eyes again, at least not for a while. Not that he wasn’t curious—not that this answer didn’t bring a whole new train of questions in its wake—but he could be patient. Now that he had this one admission out of Xiao Xingchen, the rest of the story was bound to tumble out in good time.

Xue Yang set down his buckets, rolled his shoulders, and ambled over to a coffin-bench—a more comfortable one, this time. After such a productive morning, he deserved a nice rest.