Chapter Text
Snow had a way of swallowing sound in the palace, of taking the things that were said in daylight and burying them under a clean white shroud by night.
It was falling again heavilt, softening the sharp lines of vermilion pillars and jade roofs, stitching the courtyards into a single pale sheet.
The guards kept to brazier circles and hushed voices. The maids crossed the flagged stones like ghosts, carrying their baskets close, mufflers damp with their own breath. Lanterns shivered behind paper skins, their light soft as yolk.
The East Wing had been quiet for weeks, and then months, and then so long that quiet had turned into a story people told each other: do not linger there after sundown, they would say, or you will see the Empress’s sleeve brush the corridor as she passes by; or worse, her son’s shadow seated by the window, waiting for footsteps that never come.
Zhuo Yichen sat exactly there, by the latticed window, in a robe of cream silk.
He wore no jewelry except the plain white jade ring at his thumb that had once been his grandfather’s, then his father’s, then given to him on his twelfth birthday with a laugh and a warning not to drop it into the koi pond.
He had not dropped it. He had lost many other things since, but he had not dropped the ring.
He had not noticed the brazier die. The cold slid around his ankles and up beneath the fall of his robe like water; he let it.
The winter made everything honest. It showed you where the walls cracked; it made breath visible and therefore precious.
It suited his skin, the palace women used to say with a smile when he passed as a boy. The cream and the frost, the red in his mouth, the black of his hair.
Now the same women pretended not to see him. Not out of malice; court life taught carefulness the way winter taught silence. The new emperor’s wing was bright and warm. The East Wing was a room in which the last Empress had died.
Everyone had decided she had died because her heart had become a thin cloth that tore.
Because grief for the late emperor and the late first prince had pressed too many small, invisible fingers against it.
Because she was gentle and beautiful and the world is not gentle to beautiful things.
Yichen turned the teacup in his hands and thought of her voice reciting tiny poems about plum blossoms, of her fingers pushing his inkstone closer when he wrote on cold mornings.
He thought of Mr Fan, now the emperor with the straight smile and the light touch, ordering prayers at the mountain temples, promising filial incense, addressing him as Xiao Zhuo tenderly, allowing, once in a private corridor, “If you like, call me Ādié; it is all one family.”
Yichen had not said Ādié.
He had bowed, as a son should bow to a father, as a junior should defer to an elder. One must be correct where the world is cruel.
The candle burned lower. He did not ring for more oil. Wind pressed the paper of the window and whispered into the room with a thin reed-voice.
Somewhere deeper in the wing a shutter banged once and then remembered itself, and there was silence again.
Or not quite silence.
There was, faint as a hair pulled, the scrape of leather on tile.
He lifted his head. The sound had been almost nothing, but not nothing.
It came again: not timber shifting, not a rat scampering, not wind seeking a crack. A thud like weight set down deliberately; a small whisper of fabric. The wick tipped as air shifted.
Yichen’s body, trained in only the courtly arts, and the sincerity of sitting still, and the rituals of bowing, nonetheless understood what his mind took another breath to arrive at: danger.
He did what his father, when he was still alive, had taught him.
He slid his hand beneath the bed, where a lacquered case rested, and drew out a flare.
“If you are in mortal peril, Xiao Zhuo,” his father had said, years ago, while rain struck the tiles like drumbeats. “Strike this and the help will come. It is a promise you can call with fire.”
He struck it. Sparks hissed; the flare leapt from his hand like a small star and went up, up through the opened pane he had forgotten to latch, and climbed into the sky outside where the snow fell thickly.
It burned. He smelled the powder, bitter. He let out a breath he had not known he was holding.
The first blade flashed in the candlelight like fish-silver. A man came through the window with the clean economy of someone who had done this exact motion a thousand times.
Another pried loose a roof tile and slid in on the beam line, thick scarf covering mouth and nose.
A third peeled himself from the corridor shadow.
Yichen got to his feet too quickly and the world tilted; he braced a hand on the table.
He had a vase in reach and he threw it. The vase shattered beautifully against a forearm, a million pale blue shards with cranes painted on them leaping all over the floor; the assassin grunted and swore, and another moved to strike.
Yichen turned to run and metal kissed his calf. Heat and bright pain rushed up his leg.
He stumbled; his hand went out to catch the table and caught nothing.
“Help!” he called, and then hated himself for calling, and then called again because he loved himself enough to want himself alive.
“Guards! Here!”
The men did not speak. One lifted his sword. One leaned to catch the hair that had slipped over Yichen’s shoulder as though catching the end of a ribbon at a festival.
The edge of the blade moved through candlelight. It would have crossed his throat.
He put up his hands because he could not think of what else to put up, and his body braced for the moment the string would cut.
The candle went out.
Not by itself. Not for lack of oil. It was as if a hand closed over it and pinched.
Air surged across the room. The shutters slammed open like palms clapped. Snow knifed in, sudden and sharp.
The temperature dropped by a breath that could be measured.
Something crossed the threshold from legend into the room.
The assassins’ bodies, poised, remembered fear.
The man with the sword glanced sideways with a twitch that said: flight.
A figure came through the opened window as if the night itself had decided to walk inside.
He was very tall. That was the first thing Yichen understood, because the room seemed smaller around him.
He wore red as if red had been invented for him; it hung off his shoulders the way certain trees own the snow that sits on their branches.
His mouth had the kind of curve that suggests both a smile and a wound simultaneously.
His eyes were wrong. They were red like coals and yet lit from within like lanterns.
The Great Demon.
Yichen’s father’s voice rose up in him from the past: If you see him, Xiao Zhuo, run. Do not look back. Run.
He could not run. His body had a hole in it where his calf should have held him. The blood was warm and scandalously red against the cream of his robe.
He wondered distantly, half out of himself with pain, if the stain would ever come out.
The men with swords did not move. Zhuyan raised a hand as lazily as if he were opening a fan, and the man nearest the wall flew into it and struck with a sound like a drum skin hit hard.
The one on the beam tried to become a shadow again and found there is a difference between the shadow the world makes and the shadow a demon makes; he undid like a knot in the air and dropped straight down, his breath taken in a grip that was not a hand. Caught by nothing and choked by it.
Zhuyan’s eyes burned brighter.
The man’s legs kicked once, twice, and then did not. The third made for the window and did not reach it because the night at the window had opinions about who came and went; it tightened, and sent him back into the room to slide boneless along the floor.
Silence.
Zhuyan turned his head.
When those crimson eyes found Yichen, the hum slid over nerves. It was not that the demon looked at him; it was that he looked into him, as if reading a story written on his bones.
Up close, his face was not cruel the way the stories make monsters cruel.
“So,” he said, and the voice did exactly what a voice like that should do; it filled the room without getting louder. “The little Zhuo knows me.”
“Not like your father, nor your brother,” he added, head tilting minutely, as if considering a brushstroke.
“They came to me with swords. Brave, perhaps. Very stupid. You—” his eyes moved, slow and shameless, taking in braids, the cream fold of robe, the shape of the throat where the pulse leapt, “—you are silk tied to a reed. Beautiful. Breakable.”
Shame went up Yichen’s neck like a blush of heat. The words found the place inside him that hated pity more than pain.
He reached for the nearest thing that could become a weapon and found, absurdly, a stone paperweight carved in the shape of a carp.
He threw it, because he refused to let his body forget how to refuse.
It struck Zhuyan in the chest and fell. The sound it made hitting the floor was not heroic.
Zhuyan looked down at it, then up at him, and smiled in a way that made the room colder and Yichen hotter at once.
“Still some teeth,” the demon murmured, and he sounded almost pleased. He took a step forward.
Yichen took a step back and his calf reminded him of the knife that had been there.
The leg failed. He fell against the edge of the bed and then onto it.
He said, “Stay away,” and hated that his voice shook. He said, “I don’t need—” and did not finish, because a shadow became a body immediately in front of him and arms were under him, as if the night had decided it would be more efficient to carry him.
“Put me down,” he said through his teeth, pounding a fist into a breastbone.
The body around him smelled like cold air on iron.
“Quiet, princess,” Zhuyan said, and the mockery in the word did not hide the care in the way he lowered Yichen onto the mattress. “Or you will pull that wound wider.”
“Don’t call me—” Yichen began, and then heat ghosted the edge of his ear. It was only breath, but it did not feel like only breath.
“You lit a flare,” the demon said close to the place that made Yichen’s throat work. “You begged for help. And I came.”
“I did not beg for you,” Yichen said.
Zhuyan’s hand, clawed at the tips, but not in the way of an animal, slid along the calf where the cut bled. He pressed two fingers to the wound. Warmth gathered there.
The bleeding slowed. The pain dulled. The flesh knit shyly, as if coaxed.
Yichen watched it with a fascination that shamed him. He had been taught to hate demons but he had not been taught what to do with a demon who took away pain.
“You should have let me die,” he said because it was something he could say that kept the ground beneath him feeling like a floor.
Zhuyan made a noise low in his chest that could be called a laugh. “Die?” he said, his head tipping as if he contemplated the possibility not with pity but with logic.
“You ran. You fought. You lit a fire to call men to you. You are many things, Xiao Zhuo, but not a liar. Don’t insult yourself for the sake of a pose.”
“Pose,” Yichen repeated, anger leaning.
“What do you want? If you came to finish what you began on the field. If you came to make a collection of emperors and princes, you may as well get on with it. Why this theater?”
Something in Zhuyan’s face altered. He reached and took one of the braids resting against Yichen’s chest between two fingers.
He lifted it. He twined it, just once, around his knuckle. He brought it to his mouth and inhaled.
It was the most indecent thing that had happened to Yichen in a room where men had come to cut his throat.
His breath missed itself. The air could not decide if the room was cold or his body was. Heat moved in a thin line from scalp to skin.
Zhuyan’s lashes were darker up close, and the red of his eyes deepened when he shut them on an inhalation.
“What are you doing,” Yichen managed, which was not what he meant at all.
Zhuyan’s voice came up through a growl. “Holding my temper,” he said, with a candor that made Yichen more afraid than any threat would have.
He loosened the hair and let it fall soft against silk. Then he said, almost conversationally, “The current emperor poisoned your mother.”
He said it as one might say there will be snow again tomorrow.
“No.” Yichen said it as automatically as a body says no to a blade.
“No, he loved Āniáng. He loved me. He called me son before other men. He—” Yichen’s voice stumbled because he had to step carefully over the memory that hurt, “—he told me I could say Ādié if I wanted.” He heard how small he sounded and hated it.
Zhuyan’s mouth curved without happiness. “He told you many things you wanted to hear,” he said. “He told the physicians what to tell you, too. He told the apothecaries where to fetch their herbs. Kulun Mountain has many plants of virtue. You can call it tonic if that makes it go down in the mouth easier. Names are the first lies. Slow poison does not need to be named poison to ride a body like a tame animal.”
“You lie,” Yichen said. The words came out before he could ask them to wait and be reasonable.
“You are the one who killed my father and my brother—everyone knows. Why should I—”
“They came for me with swords,” Zhuyan said.
“I do not permit the killing of me. They tried. I refused. Would you lie down under steel and call it virtue?”
“I—” Yichen began, and then stopped. He sat straighter and hated the way his body wanted to lean toward the warmth he had earlier decided not to want.
“You are a demon,” he said, as if perhaps that word could push the other words back into order. “You say what you need to breach a city.”
Zhuyan tilted his head; a curious, almost tender expression brushed his features.
“You are weak,” he said. “But you are not a fool. Watch the palace. Taste your mother’s medicine with your tongue and with a dog’s tongue, if you like. Ask the consort why her wedding silk was measured before the mourning silk was folded. Ask the steward how many times the guard posts were changed outside your door this month. You will see. You don’t need my eyes. You have your own.”
“I don’t want your eyes or your mouth in my rooms,” Yichen said, which felt at least like returning to a road he knew how to walk on.
“Tell me what you want and leave. If it is to kill me, I ask only that you do it cleanly, and leave my mother’s jade where it is.”
Zhuyan’s laughter was quieter than before. “Kill you,” he repeated, tasting the words.
“No.”
He leaned forward then, and for the first time since he entered the room, seriousness settled over him.
“I want you to marry me.”
Yichen stared at him. He had thought perhaps the demon would say I want your life, or I want your house, or I want your loyalty, or I want you to run when I allow it so I may follow.
He had not thought the demon would say I want to marry you, in the tone with which a man says pass the vinegar.
“I am a man,” Yichen said, because among the many words in the room this was one of the few that felt like a plank he could stand on.
“And I am a demon,” Zhuyan returned without blink or apology.
“Your genders are cages you build and admire and pass down like heirlooms. We do not admire cages.” His eyes, inhuman and completely intent, lowered to Yichen’s mouth.
“You smell,” he added in a different voice entirely, “like snow over ripe fruit.”
“That is not—” Yichen began, mortified.
“That is not a reason to—”
“It is a reason to many things,” Zhuyan said, and then he did something that undid Yichen properly.
He bent and touched his mouth to the skin at the bend Yichen’s neck.
It was not a kiss. Kissing belongs to human choreography.
It was contact that said: mine and also: taste and also: this is the place where your pulse lives.
Yichen made a sound he did not know his voice made; he hated himself for it and could not get it back once it was out.
He felt the small edges of the demon’s fangs graze skin and then press.
Pain opened like a flower and then underneath it another sensation opened that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with heat uncoiling in a place no tutor had ever mentioned in any lesson.
His body, which had been loyal to him all his life, betrayed him for the first time with fervor.
Zhuyan’s breath caught. The sound he made was not human, and not cruel. It was hunger.
He tasted, no, he drank, then licked the place he had hurt, slowly.
“Mn,” he said into Yichen’s skin, the voice roughened, pleasure. “Delicious.”
Shame burned Yichen’s face. He shoved at the demon’s chest, palms against the hard plane.
“Get away,” he said. His voice did a poor job of pretending disdain. “You have no right—”
Zhuyan went back an inch. He looked at Yichen the way predators look: with fascination, with constraint, with appetite.
There was a smear of red at the corner of his mouth he had the indecency not to wipe. Yichen felt heat walk through him at the sight so cleanly he almost mistook it for anger.
“You will have time,” the demon said, more softly than he had said anything since he arrived.
“To check my words. To taste your own tea. To watch who looks away when you say your mother’s name. When I return”—and he said it without question: when—“I expect your answer.”
“If I refuse you,” Yichen said. “you will kill me?”
Zhuyan turned his head toward the window and the night that had come in with him. “I do not need to kill you,” he said.
“You will be dead before my hand gets the chance. They have sharpened so many knives in your absence. The only reason you are not yet a story the maids whisper is that I arrived between the sharpening and the throat.”
He set two fingers briefly to the healed place at Yichen’s calf as if sealing his own work, then turned, stepping up onto the sill.
Winter breathed in.
He looked back. Just enough to make a promise look like an afterthought and therefore more dangerous.
“Do not die,” he said, and for the first time the words sounded as if they hurt him to say. “I won’t allow it.”
He went out into the snow. The room felt wrong without him. It felt colder, and not because the shutter had opened, though the shutter had opened.
The candle’s wick remembered itself and found a blue thread at its heart and climbed to flame again.
Yichen sat, the bed under him suddenly too soft and too hard.
He pressed his hand to the place on his neck where teeth had been. There was tenderness and a small ache, and a heat under it like a coal under ash.
He put his head in his hands and laughed once because lords and ghosts both would have been outraged at crying at such an hour.
The laugh broke into something else immediately, a sound that was not anything he had been taught to make.
He cried.