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The Heavenly Court would not do anything as crass as have weather, but there are exceptions. Elemental masters tend toward narrative drama. The ground deepens and softens for Earth Masters, the air crackles for those whose affinity burns with Fire. But since the Heavens are almost all sky, the Rain Master’s ascension is a shock of dark clouds and petrichor, the usual heaviness of sunshine-thick blossom dissipating as water scatters down even as far as the Middle Court.
Ling Wen is only one of a thousand junior officials, the whole tired flock of them hunching protectively over their scrolls. But some of the rain still catches her cheek. Cleaner than she remembers. Rain in the cities is no good thing when you rely on outdoor markets to survive.
But this rain is cool and soft. Ling Wen—almost used to her name, now, if not the strange tedium of life in the Middle Court—raises her head. The clouds diffuse the usual brightness of an Immortal’s ascension, and she catches a glimpse of the new Rain Master through the press of heavenly bodies.
“Yushi Huang,” someone says. “That’s Yushi Huang—”
“—Yushi’s Queen, and right at the last minute—”
“—The Princess who—
“—slit her throat, just like that —”
“ —The new Rain Master?”
“—Let me see. Let me see .”
Ling Wen can see strong shoulders. This new god rides a massive black ox, and her own legs are strong to match, showing through as the royal regalia she died in turns to simpler, soft robes. Ling Wen sees that the other woman has smooth, heavy hair. Eyes that might, Ling Wen thinks, with the long-sleeping part of her that used to sneak poetry like sweets, match the soft, cloud-filtered light. Her sword is taking up a God’s power—bright, then brighter—but still spattered with mortal blood. Ling Wen looks up and sees Yushi Huang’s smile. It is careful, serene. It seems faintly surprised at the corners. It matches the slow-closing wound at her neck.
Standing in the Heavenly Court gives Yushi Huang the same sick, hectic feeling as being stuck on a roof in her palace’s cultivation hall. The place glitters. Officials move in groups, and the press of people and fabrics and whispering reminds her too much of her childhood. Every step she takes here strains, as if her skeleton would like nothing more than to free itself from her creeping, awkward, heavenly skin.
She rests her hand against a peach tree. With her fingertips against the whorls in the bark, she can let herself be sap slow and sap steady, even if this poor thing is stuck blooming out of season. Yushi Huang does not know Jun Wu well. She is glad she never needs to—she can’t bring herself to approve of his gardening.
Her own life was tied to seasons: preparing winter ground until her thighs cramped and her hands blistered; the strength and ache of her back as she tilled and sowed; the satisfaction of watching green things press up through the soil filling her body like a slow, happy breath. The weight and the waiting. Sweat sticking to her skin as she guarded crops from birds and chokeweeds until finally, harvest came in a colourful, crowded rush and then winter breathed out, quiet and still, and it was back to preparing the ground.
Yushi Huang is used to the inevitability of change. Even now, with her cultivation at its current immortal state, the actual Heavenly Realm feels static—somehow wrong. She’ll talk to Ox about it later, and he will laugh at her and at the meddling, strange rest of them, and she’ll make pickles with her latest offering. The farmers were a lovely family, and she has heard their prayers about Granny’s back, so if the carrots and turnips they offer happen to be in a more shelf-stable state when they return for them? Well. Yushi Huang revels in small favours.
She—really needs to move. The Heavenly Court isn’t going to go away if she stands here with her eyes closed, like a child pretending the world she can’t see no longer exists. Just a few steps, one excruciating conversation with the civil officials, and then she can go back to Yushi country, where the world makes more sense, at least most of the time. She just needs—
—scrolls fall at her feet in a muted, expensive clatter. Yushi Huang opens her eyes.
A junior official is on her knees, gathering up her work with a quietly murderous air. She’s all soft blacks and muttered city dialect that Yushi Huang barely understands, and when the official looks up Yushi Huang wonders if she’s slept in the last decade. The shadows under her eyes look like violet thumbprints.
“Lord Rain Master,” she says. “Apologies, this o—”
“—not at all.” There are too many scrolls for one set of arms. Yushi Huang kneels to pick up the sets that have rolled out of the junior official’s reach. She knows that tired face. There are few enough women officials that it’s hard not to take note of each one, and civil officials are even fussier about their ranks than marital gods or elemental masters. Yushi Huang may not be very good at dealing with people, but she does notice them, and Jing Wen’s decision to raise Nangong Jie as his deputy in the Middle Court is a legend.
She had not known Nangong Jie was quite so pretty.
“I was looking for you, anyway,” says Yushi Huang. A decade since her death and ascension, and words still feel too thick in her mouth, air leaking out before it makes it all the way from lungs to throat to her tongue. It’s a fancy—she is scarred but whole-skinned, air won’t trickle from her like a punctured waterskin no matter how much the adhesions tug. She smiles, rueful. “Not you, I suppose—the palace of Jing Wen. But you’re much better.”
A small noise, as if the junior official is breathing out an acknowledgement that yes, anyone would be better than Jing Wen, while she keeps her expression smooth and blank. “Thank you, Your Highness.”
Both women stand, arms full of scrolls. “I was Queen for half a day,” says Yushi Huang. “No need to use titles with me.”
Fine dark brows knit together. “You are a princess of Yushi,” says Nangong Jie. She looks like she’s ticking off a list in her mind: ‘Everything This Junior Official Knows About The Princess Who Slit Her Throat’.
Shrugging is all the deflection Yushi Huang can manage while her hands are full. “Last and least. It was nothing much. These are going back to the palace?”
“Yes, Lord Rain Master,” says Nangong Jie. She pauses, and Yushi Huang is delighted by the small, sardonic smile that tips her mouth. “I trust this name is acceptable?”
Yushi Huang laughs. It comes up slow and startled, rasping over the rough places in her throat. “It is,” she says. “So is my name. And I know you’ve been here longer than I have. I can be Huang-mei!”
No one calls her Huang-mei except Ox, and him only when he is feeling fond. This Nangong Jie will not, by the slightly appalled look in her bruised eyes.
“No, Lord Rain Master.”
“Fine, fine.” Another shrug. “What should I call you?”
“These days, I am Ling Wen,” the official says. “Are you here about your palace?”
“Yes,” says Yushi Huang. “I don’t want one. I don’t need one. Who do I see about that?”
Ling Wen looks up at her with a raised eyebrow. “You are the Rain Master,” she says.
“And I live in Yushi with an ox, Ling Wen. What am I going to do with a palace?”
Ling Wen sighs. “Master Jing Wen is going to want a long conversation.”
It almost sounds like, ‘I’m sorry.’
Everyone knows about the Prince of Xianle. Such a shame. And so strange — a glorious figure reduced to running from one country to the next, eating up days and whole temples worth of power as he tries to bring rain to a dying nation. Feng Xin is as stoic as ever, but doesn’t that Mu Qing just look like he is going to combust? He sweeps up all the embarrassment his master refuses to carry. It’s frantic. Too much. The Emperor gives him so much leash. If you were his favourite, now, or perhaps even this one—
—Such a shame. The Rain Master ought to know better than to help him this way. She’s been in the Heavens longer than he has. Of course, she is never here—always up to her elbows in those root vegetables she begs off her believers. Queen of radishes and carrots, that one — but powerful. Aiyah. The Heavens have never been fair. But we’re off track, aren’t we? Who even told him?
What about?
About the Rain Master, of course. The Flower Crowned Prince of Xianle barely knows his way outside his palace. How would he know to go begging all the way in Yushi country? And why power is still kept in that backwater, when Xuli is right—
—Ling Wen? you’re still here? I told you to sort—why do I bother? I should have left you with your shoes. Don’t ‘Yes, Jing Wen’ me. If you can stand still, you’re not doing nearly enough.
Yushi Huang is not in the Heavens for Ling Wen’s full ascension, nor Pei Ming’s after that. The Rain Master and her Ox manage the summer weeding, and while stories of General Ming Guang’s heavenly escapades sometimes blow in with the wind, she does keep half an eye on the civil god. Temples are built in Yushi, though she winces a little over the perfect gentleman figure Ling Wen’s worshippers make of her.
Her own worshipers paint her to be Ox’s human twin more often than not, and Yushi Huang never cares. Sometimes, moving through the world in that shape as Lord Rain Master is easier than being one of the four tales, and she has never cared much about her body. But the mix of scandalised whispers about Ling Wen’s ascension and the worshippers that cannot countenance asking a woman for help with their civil service exams, changing her shape so she fits , is a particular brand of discomfiting.
She removes the joke offerings from Ling Wen’s temples whenever she sees them.
A new Water Master ascends.
When Yushi Huang’s rain rolls into her farmland, it tastes of shipwrecks and metal.
“Noble Jie— Noble Jie —”
Ling Wen is too tired for this.
Pei Ming has good dark eyes, and he knows how to use them, but imploring puppies do nothing for her. He’s even trying to use the stacks of scrolls on her desk to his advantage, peering over them as if he is truly a frightened child, hiding in her palace.
“—isn’t this a bit beneath you, Ol’ Pei?”
“All sorts of things are beneath me. This isn’t fun, though. I’m in real trouble here.”
“Good.”
“Heartless wench, A-Jie.”
“I have a heart. General Ming Guang. You are here, aren’t you?”
Those puppy eyes crinkle. The wickedness there makes something ease in Ling Wen’s chest. “But she’s right out there ,” he says, in a heavy stage whisper.
Sighing, Ling Wen stands and walks around to his side of the desk, letting one thumb dig hard into the tension between her brows. “I’m going to tell Shi Wudu,” she tells him. “And he is going to laugh and laugh .”
“You wretch.”
She pauses, halfway to the door. Carefully judged. “Do you want me to go out there or not, Ol’ Pei?”
“You paragon.”
“Laugh and laugh and laugh.”
Outside, Yushi Huang is examining the tired gardens in Ling Wen’s courtyard. She has never thought of what to do with them; when her magic extends itself to renovating Zhen Jun Palace, it is usually to add new shelves. Under the Rain Master’s dark, gentle hands, the spindly trees seem to sigh in relief. Looking at her, Ling Wen does not understand Pei Ming’s fear. So what, if the Rain Master might ‘ask him something ’? No one in Pei Ming’s orbit needs him as much as he fears they do—not even poor, stupid Xuan Ji—but this woman?
Ling Wen feels herself smile. It’s easy to hide, but it still leaves an ache, sore and sweet. “How might this one assist you, Rain Master?”
Yushi Huang raises her head. “You could,” she says, in a careful rasp, “water these poor plants.”
“I’m sorry—”
“—no, no.” The Rain Master grins, suddenly, and it’s lightning-crooked. “I mean, you should , but that’s not why I’m here. I just—” a shrug. She rummages in one sleeve, drawing out fistfuls of merits with a despairing air. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
Ling Wen swallows. The merits fall to the ground, discarded like old skin or the rich’s food scraps, and it makes her itch. “…Lord Rain Master?”
“I ask them not to,” Yushi Huang says in a slow sigh. “‘Proper’ offerings are forbidden in Yushi Country. I just want everyone to take their offerings back once the incense burns out. Food is more important than prayer. But there is always someone .”
“The Rain Master is most singular,” Ling Wen manages.
A softer smile. “If you mean ‘Yushi Huang is stupid like her ox’, you can say so, you know.”
“This one has—I’ve never thought you stupid,” Ling Wen says, finally giving in to the impulse to cup her hands where the Rain Master is still spilling merits to the ground.
“Neither is my ox. He’d be the first to tell you so.”
A strangled sound. It takes Ling Wen a moment to realise the laughter is trapped in her own throat. “Exactly so. Just…please stop doing that?” she gestures to the merits still dripping from Yushi Huang’s fist. “You’re making paperwork.”
Yushi Huang’s hands close around hers. She carries sword and farming calluses with her on her Immortal form. The warmth and roughness make Ling Wen swallow. “Give these merits to someone , then,” the Rain Master says, almost apologetic. “Surely you can find some unlucky soul. Like that boy you sent my way all those years ago. Someone who needs riches more than this one.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“—A kind junior official in the Middle Court,” Yushi Huang says, not letting go of Ling Wen’s hands. Merits shine through their combined fingers. “Little-Nangong-Jie-that-was, were you not? Who sent that Crown Prince of Xianle all the way to me? My good ox asked him many questions.”
“I could not possibly say,” Ling Wen manages. “I have heard that particular Crown Prince has a terrible memory.”
“En.” A long, soft exhale. “And you were not so little. But you’ve made me speak more words than I would in a month. I’ll leave you be, A-Wen.” A pause. “Give them to Pei Ming!” she says, smile flashing again. “He loves shiny things.”
Discombobulated in her own courtyard, hands held, and ground slightly unsteady, Ling Wen could not hold back her laughter this time, even if keeping it in meant no paperwork for a month.
“You deal with them.”
Ox’s rumble, warm and familiar and slightly annoyed, barely registers. The day is scorching, sweat gathers at the small of Yushi Huang’s back as she hefts her basket of weeds. It’s nearly full. Not the worst hour’s work of her life. When Ox raises a cup of water in her direction, she sets the basket down; runs gentle knuckles over the top of his head. More of a stretch, now that he’s no longer a stone icon. He wears his human skin the same way he wears his smirk: easily, with rough charm.
“That’s your job,” she says. “You know you’re better with people.”
“I’m your beast of burden.”
“En.”
“Meimei, don’t. Don’t even say it—”
“—People are the most burdensome, Lao Niu.”
When he sighs, Yushi Huang can hear the wind blow through the old courtyard at Yulong. He can still be stone, when he wants to be, her General. She smiles sidelong.
“That joke is as old as we are,” he tells her. “And it’s too late, anyway. They’re nearly here. You should not snub the Water Master. He’d be tedious about it.”
“The Water Master?” Disquiet flutters, no matter how unwelcome she makes it.
“And the Wind Master. You can all be a storm or something,” says Ox, smile twitching. “And that one you like.”
“That one I—”
“—Rain Master!”
Yushi Huang needs only those first bell-like tones to know the person behind her. The breeze plucking at her hair and sleeves is only a pretty descant to go with it. When she turns, Shi Qingxuan is upon her in a swirl of spring colours, fan moving to match his words, gesturing freely at her garden, at Ox (gone silent and solid and back in his animal skin, the coward), at the two figures still making their way down the path to Yushi Huang’s cottage.
“I told Ming-xiong to come, and then almost all the Elemental Masters would be together,” Shi Qingxuan is saying. “Which would be delightful, wouldn’t it? Because that never happens, but he said he was busy, and when I asked again he just looked —you know, the way he does, and it just wasn’t to be. Pei Ming was with us, but when ge said we were coming here he turned a funny colour. Isn’t that ridiculous? He hasn’t seen you in years , you’d think he’d forget. Oh. I’m sorry, Rain Master, was that—”
“—It’s nothing,” says Yushi Huang. She pats the younger immortal’s cheek. She can’t help it. Shi Qingxuan’s loquaciousness is soothing. She has plenty of time to form her own words under the burbling rush of his. She visits the Heavenly Court so seldom that his presence feels like a rare childhood treat: bright and a little too sweet, but welcome.
“What is a gathering of elemental masters, anyway?” muses Shi Qingxuan.
“An inconvenience.”
Ling Wen reaches them without a hair out of place and a slow shake of her head. She is slight and weary looking, the dark shadows beneath her eyes somehow intensified by the male form she wears out of the heavenly realm. She is elegant and long limbed, beautifully dressed—but stretched. Tense and thin lipped and somehow a little faded about the edges. Yushi Huang has heard it takes a lot of power for her to hold herself together in this shape, but seeing how frayed and how unlike herself Ling Wen looks now is unsettling. Shi Wudu, standing behind his friend and looking around the place as if it needs sweeping, seems hulking in comparison, though he’s a head shorter than Ling Wen in her male form.
Shi Qingxuan, who Yushi Huang has seen shift forms more easily and gleefully than he throws out merits, whacks Ling Wen on the shoulder with his fan.
“Don’t be mean, Ling Wen Zhen Jun!”
“Then try not to be dull, Lord Wind Master,” she answers, but she smiles faintly, turning back to Yushi Huang and inclining her head. “Apologies, Your Highness.”
The address, which has never sat right, makes Yushi Huang’s cheeks burn. It’s nothing. It’s just Ling Wen resorting to formality in company. Knowing her clever tricks, the idea of doubling up ‘Wind Master’ and ‘Rain Master’ too close together upsets her sense of literary balance.
(That one you like .)
Yushi Huang wants to fuss and remind her to use her name, but the unexpectedness of the visit and the rush of words and bodies makes her retreat into stolidity, even as the Water Master explains his business and Ling Wen takes notes.
The Water Master’s needs are not important. In the end, Ox deals with them; he leans his bulk against her shoulder and lets his words rumble out between chews of his cud, and all she needs to do is look calm and nod. If Shi Wudu and Shi Qingxuan think it strange an ox is discussing—what is it? Taxation? More blasted merits?—with them, Yushi Huang is old and powerful enough that they say nothing, even when she is left stupid like this.
She blinks, and the two brothers are walking arm in arm up her path to the road out of Yushi country. Yushi Huang is rising from a bow she does not remember making and the only one left is Ling Wen, who looks even tenser and more stretched than when the whole clamouring lot of them arrived. She watches the civil god tuck her notes away and feels leftover air come out in a slow wheeze.
“I would have warned you,” Ling Wen says, soft. “But you’ve never connected with the communication array.”
Yushi Huang feels her lips twitch. “I cannot imagine much worse.”
“A repeat of this inconvenience?”
She snorts. “Fair point.”
Ling Wen is still looking at her, head tilted a little to the side, fingers of one hand twitching as if she wants to reach out. Ink stains her nail beds.
“You can visit,” Yushi Huang says. “And I don’t mind the Wind Master. Who could?”
A faint smile for that.
“You can visit any time,” she repeats. “If you need something. If you needed to escape the noise up there. I’ve got space. There’s soup.”
“Soup?”
This comes out bewildered, and Yushi Huang finally laughs. “My worshippers leave me a lot of vegetables,” she says. “And I like soup.”
“I—” Ling Wen shakes her head, “En. As you say. But—are you well?”
“Oh yes,” she says. “Some reactions are slower to fade than others, that’s all. One day, I’ll stand in a crowd of people who want something from me and I’ll actually feel calm, instead of—what you saw.”
“You…” Again, that twitch of Ling Wen’s fingers. “Lord Rain Master appeared very calm,” she says. “Almost.”
“Almost,” Yushi Huang agrees. “Come visit again, A-Wen. By yourself?”
“For…soup.”
“Yes, exactly!”
It rains when they fight. Heat rises, cold spirals down until clouds are thick with it, the air metallic in Ling Wen’s mouth. The taste cuts through the ache in her jaw, even overlaying the usual blood-metal and burnt hair that fills her whenever she wears the Brocade Immortal. Rain is in her eyes, her nose. It soaks her through until her skin is scraped raw by the wet hessian, her own poor stitching digging into her neck, down her back.
Bai Jing keeps her upright—she moves, she blocks, all with the martial skill that was meant to save Xuli – but each strike is won in a landscape that moves to support its master.
Yushi Huang knows how to be still. The rain that darkens Ling Wen’s vision sheets from the Rain Master’s straw hat, and Yulong shines— like streambed pebbles, like dragon scales. If she is disturbed by the aura of Bai Jing’s bloodied remains, she does not show it. She meets Ling Wen, block to strike, strike to block, and a small, giddy, exhausted part of her thinks that the other woman might be smiling.
“Ling Wen, aren’t you tired?”
Tired. She has never not been tired. She is—
“Ling Wen Zhen Jun. Please, I’m not going to hurt you and you will not hurt me.”
“I can,” Ling Wen says. “Like this, I can—” The mud makes her slip. Just a step.
“Hush.” Yushi Huang is in Ling Wen’s space now, the careful, defensive swordsmanship set aside as she stands steadfast before a palm strike.
When it hits, the shock runs up Ling Wen’s arm, but the other woman does not move. Instead, she tilts back her head. Rain beads in the divots at the base of her throat, settling into pools of scar tissue. Her own eyes blur before she can see if those pools spill.
“That young man knows this Huang-mei will not harm you,” Yushi Huang says, nonsensically. She isn’t even winded. “I just wanted to talk to you, A-Wen.”
“You’re—I’m—” Ling Wen swallows. “You are very strange, and I am not one of yours. Your sword can’t paralyse me. I am Xuli.”
Yushi Huang’s laughter should not feel warm. The rain must be getting to them both.
“Oh, but you’re ‘Not Xuli’, Ling Wen. That’s your most famous legend, even out here.”
Ling Wen stares. “…you’re making puns? Now?”
“Come inside,” says the Rain Master. “Ox made that soup I promised. Don’t worry, his tail didn’t get anywhere near it.”
Somehow, Ling Wen finds she is bundled in more than the Brocade Immortal. Yushi Huang has blankets to spare, and the soup is surprisingly good. She is shaky, adrenaline from the fight long gone until she feels utterly lost in her own body, worse than the first time visited the mortal realm and discovered that other people’s prayers had changed her shape. The same shape she wears now, centuries later, in this warm and unlikely place.
She hadn’t expected that. She has fantasised about running away from her palace more times than is probably healthy, even among civil gods, and one of the best parts of that fantasy was losing the expectation of a male shape in the mortal world. And yet, here she is, all elbows and knees and Bai Jing and probable death under a mountain, and she is still Ling Wen Zhen Jun. Only with Yushi Huang. And soup.
“You can be on your way after you’ve eaten, if you want,” Yushi Huang says comfortably, as if she hadn’t been fighting hard in the mud half an hour before and Ling Wen wasn’t a growing puddle of existential dread. “That Mountain won’t finish its business for a while yet. Even if it’s angry, it’s working at its own mountain pace.”
“Why did you stop me?”
“You look terrible,” Yushi Huang says. “And I had soup.”
“That’s all ?”
“Ah, you are flustered, A-Wen.” The Rain Master settles back against her cushions, smile soft. “I know things are very strange and crowded up there at the moment,” she says, with an easy flick of her fingers toward the heavens. “I don’t know what is going to happen, and I am not sure if the Emperor is being sensible. I know you are not being sensible, but you look very tired. I can offer rest. You are kind to me whenever I go up there. You deal with all those pesky merits!”
The other woman’s steady blasphemy makes a part of Ling Wen squirm. But the rest of her wants to yawn and lean forward into the other woman’s warmth, and it is taking her whole will to stop that part from taking over. She is left still, expressionless.
“If you know my stories, then you know about the Brocade Immortal,” she says. Perhaps if Ling Wen angers Yushi Huang this can all end.
“En.”
“And?”
Yushi Huang’s smile does not fade. “People are horrible, Ling Wen Zhen Jun,” she says. The words fall between them. Smooth and separate, like perfect stones. “Why do you think I have an ox for my general?”
Pain spangles up Ling Wen’s jaw into her forehead. “Don’t call me that,” she says. “I’ve given up my role, and I’m—” she grimaces. “Like this, still , even after giving it up, which is some extra salt I did not know to expect. I don’t—”
A small furrow appears between Yushi Huang’s eyebrows. “Like what?”
Ling Wen resents her own small, frustrated noise as she gestures at the long, straight lines of her body, in its male shape for the mortal realm. “As they see me,” she says. “It’s always been a necessary annoyance, but to be the ‘perfect gentleman’ after all this is a little much.”
The furrow clears. “Ah,” says Yushi Huang. “Well. I see a lovely woman in my house. Her coat is a little unsettling, and I would like to help her out of it, but Ling Wen is the sort of jewel my siblings would try to hide from me, if they lived still.”
This is not—Ling Wen knows her own memory. Knows all the files there, including the ones where she has blushed. This is—new.
“Your business is your business, A-Wen,” says the Rain Master, her tone still placid, but a slow heat building in her cheeks, even the tops of her ears. “But you are lovely, and you were always one of the heavenly realm’s few bright spots, even hidden with all your scrolls.”
Ling Wen sniffs. “Yushi Huang, you were never there.”
“And yet,” says the other woman. “It feels like you noticed those few times when I was.”
“How do you know?” Ling Wen asks, chin raised, and jaw set even as she wants to shiver at the feeling of Yushi Huang standing close against her back, hands hovering at her waist. “How do you know I won’t just trick you? I could. We could do this and then you’d be putting your clothes back on and you’d never know you were touching the Brocade Immortal once it left my body. You would put it on thinking it was just something of yours and then—” she snaps her fingers. “That is that. No more Huang-mei.”
Yushi Huang reaches up—Ling Wen is taller in this form—and presses her lips to Ling Wen’s shoulder. “Now you call me that?”
“ That’s what you’re focusing on?”
“I see more than most give me credit for,” Yushi Huang muses, lips still dragging against Ling Wen’s skin. “And I already said. That young man knows I would not harm you.”
“Don’t—” Ling Wen turns. “If we do this, don’t bring ghosts into the bedroom.”
“Too late, A-Wen,” the Rain Master says, but she is smiling as she says it, hands slipping beneath the grotesque hessian sack so she can pull it over Ling Wen’s head. She is full of concentration, carefully folding what must look like little more than skeins of shadow to her eyes, but Ling Wen’s throat clogs a little as she notes the slow care Yushi Huang takes with the garment, matching it corner to corner and setting it neatly down. Bai Jing gives up easily, which is its own strange sting.
“Ol’ Pei,” Ling Wen finds herself muttering, even as she lets herself cup Yushi Huang’s jaw and begin a slow, exploratory kiss, the other woman’s mouth opening, slick and easy, under her own. “Is an idiot.”
A startled huff of laughter slips between their mouths. “Yes,” Yushi Huang manages, that surprising, lightning smile cracking the usual serenity of her face—just for a moment. “And?”
“Nothing, Huang-mei.” Slowly, wonder mixing strangely with want and the steady beat of the rain outside, Ling Wen lets her hands roam. Yushi Huang’s robes, petal bright, picked through with the good green of growing things, are easy to remove. Soft and worn from working, though lovingly cared for. Soon, Ling Wen learns the sound Yushi Huang makes at the feel of lips pressed between her breasts. The weight of those breasts in her hands, heavy and warm and full enough that the skin stripes and silvers. She flicks her tongue along those marks.
A tiny thought spirals up and she wants to leave her unexpected lover so wet from her mouth that it looks like they’ve been doing this in the rain, and Ling Wen lets herself chase imaginary water droplets until Yushi Huang is shaking and the air is thick with the smell of them both.
Ling Wen’s own chest aches, her skin sensitive and over-warm and her mind a little too full. As if her own breasts are bound and trapped, her cunt clenching even as this body’s cock stirs. She has fucked like this—a brief flash of Shi Wudu’s old, familiar smirk—no, no ghosts in this bed. She has fucked like this, been fucked in this body and her own when she’s wanted it. Not often, and always with a clean, clear sense of distance and control.
This is—not that. This is Yushi Huang’s low groans and the clench of farmer’s hands on her hips and back and the rasping, thick whisper of, “Sweet girl! Sweet A-Wen!” when Ling Wen has her pressed back on a couch. She is straddled across Yushi Huang’s broad thigh and there is nothing distant about it, as she leaves the other woman’s skin spit-slick and wetness trickles down Yushi Huang’s leg before Ling Wen ever puts her fingers there. Instead, she shifts down to the floor, chasing its path down the inside of her thigh to knee, knee to ankle and instep. Her lips burn and catch on faint roughness there, even as Yushi Huang lets out a shocked, warm laugh.
“Too much, A-Wen—that tickles!”
Ling Wen finds she’s smiling when she looks up. Swift and a little bit soft. She wants to make Yushi Huang a pair of shoes and that thought is just too much. Too silly for words and far too close, so she reaches up and around to pull Yushi Huang exactly where she wants her, and finally lets her mouth drag back up until she can press close between the Rain Master’s legs, using mouth and tongue and even the bridge of her nose until Yushi Huang is a gasping, fucked out mess and Ling Wen’s face and throat are as wet as when they were fighting, hours before.
She allows herself a moment of smugness in the afterglow. Her own arousal is a heartbeat throb, and feels Yushi Huang’s pulse where her hands still rest at the join of the other woman’s hip and cunt and thigh. It still skitters, hectic and bright, and Ling Wen lets herself laugh.
She does not expect Yushi Huang to draw her back up to the couch as if she weighs nothing. The Rain Master is flushed, and tear streaked, hair sticking to her face, and there is the same sweet surprise at the corners of her mouth as when she first ascended. She presses Ling Wen to her and it is so good that Ling Wen can’t help her own gasp.
“You caught this one by surprise,” Yushi Huang murmurs. “But I—is it all right if I touch you , A-Wen? You—I won’t, if you don’t want more.”
The tenderness in the question makes Ling Wen swallow. She lets herself relax into Yushi Huang’s body. Lets herself feel the heat in her skin, the stickiness where her inner robe presses against her cock. Lets herself feel it as hers , with all the mess and strangeness and sweet, sun-shower brightness of feeling beautiful in the eyes of another person.
“Does the Rain Master know,” Ling Wen says, keeping her tone dry and her words precise. “That this one is often ranked as ‘Heavenly Official Most In Need of a Proper Orgasm and a Nap’?” she pauses, triumphant at Yushi Huang’s widening eyes and startled laughter. “At least, according to horrible people.”
Yushi Huang is used to rising before the sun. At Yulong, laying abed after the house roosters meant you were sick, dead, or would soon wish you were, and the habit is hard to break. Besides, she likes her house in these still moments, when she imagines the world inverted, the sun creeping in through tiny gaps and around the edges of things, clinging to night as a pale shadow.
Now, with Ling Wen warm and still in her arms, Yushi Huang watches that light drift down over their bodies like dandelion fluff through the tangle of the other woman’s hair, and hardly dares to breathe. Her left arm is turning numb. Her face itches. Ling Wen is pressed back against her, head against Yushi Huang’s shoulder, neck a little arched in a way that is probably causing a serious crick while she sleeps, and she is more relaxed than the other woman has ever seen her. Though Yushi Huang can’t see her lover’s face, she imagines the shadows under her eyes growing fainter with every slow indrawn breath.
Smiling, Yushi Huang draws on every cultivation trick she knows to acknowledge, then to set aside, the muscle cramps and hair in her mouth and the faint sticking between her thighs. She accepts each hard knob of Ling Wen’s spine against her chest, lets her right arm tuck more securely around the other woman, and she allows herself to drift.
A week as a daruma doll is almost more rest than Ling Wen can remember. The chaos of Mount Tong’lu; the mess of ghosts and Jun Wu’s voice in her head had been worse than when she and Pei Ming burned Jing Wen’s temples—that task, she’d do again in any lifetime, but the noise of it had rung through her head for months, the ash mixing with sweat and her usual ink into something vile and bodied, as if all her senses were conspiring to make her itch and remember. Now, her head is quiet, and her hands are clean. She is not wearing Bai Jing, and that is a problem, but first—
—first, she needs to understand how she is standing in Yushi Huang’s doorway. The house is closed up, but she is leaning against it as if she’d been tucked gently out of the rain. The garden sprawls at her feet like a carpet, growing neater and more pragmatic the further it stretches from the house, full up with cabbages and turnips and…whatever else the Rain Master cultivates at this time of year. There are patches of whimsy—near-spent narcissus lifting their fairy faces up to the sky while chrysanthemums are beginning to grow heavy and golden around the cottage—but mostly Ling Wen sees row after row of crops. Some of the planting looks newer—fragile. If she squints, Ling Wen imagines she can see where she and Yushi Huang once fought, new growth covering their steps, the places where Bai Jing’s strength had pushed the Rain Master back, hard, into the earth. The spot where Yushi Huang had, with that slow smile, refused to fall.
If Jun Wu asks her to stand with him again, Ling Wen is less sure she’ll say yes. She tries to tell herself that this is only because he is on the losing side, but—blinking to awareness and strangely ache-free limbs as she wakes from Hua Cheng’s spell—that answer feels hollow in ways she would prefer not to think about.
Sighing, Ling Wen walks to one of the patches of new growth. Some of the greenery is disrupting the careful lines of the Rain Master’s cultivation. Nangong Jie grew up barely able to tell withered marketplace carrots from radishes, but something compels her to kneel, now. She picks through the greenery that seems to be strangling their bed mates and pulls them gently from the soil.
She needs to leave. She needs to find Bai Jing—should learn the new lay of the heavens and whether they’ll be foolish enough to keep a place for her. But her thoughts are still daruma thoughts, perhaps. Smooth and wooden and heavy with sleep.
Weeding until she feels normal is not the worst thing she has ever done.
The Heavens are more tolerable now. Xie Lian seems to view them with the same sceptical eye as Yushi Huang, and so even with all his unshackled power, his presence there is delicate and transitory. Ghosts now move through the Grand Marshall Hall with the confidence of Officials, a few of them following in Crimson Rain Sought Flower’s dramatic stead and picking up enough worshipers that even the most hidebound of the Heavenly Court can’t do much about it.
There are still too many people, but they are different people. Sometimes, that helps.
Ling Wen’s palace is much the same, though with better tended gardens. She spots some splotchy junior officials wrestling with a clematis vine. They need hats, but the sight makes her smile.
She spots Ling Wen in the courtyard, looking at Xie Lian with something like exasperated fondness.
“It’s better this way, Your Highness.”
Xie Lian gestures gentle defeat. “As you say, as you say. It’s just—you didn’t need me for this, Ling Wen.”
“You say that about every task you’re given, Your Highness.”
“En.”
Yushi Huang’s smile grows as Ling Wen sucks air through her teeth. “And this…this wasn’t for the Heavens,” Ling Wen manages, as if each word is full of pins. “Your Highness, it was this—”
“—I know. Hush.” His hands catch at hers, leaving the rest of Ling Wen’s declaration unsaid. “That’s why I agreed.” His gentle smile broadens into something a little bit wicked, and Ling Wen shakes her head.
“Your husband has you filled to the brim with romance,” she says, sighing when Xie Lian splutters and turns red from chin to hairline.
“ Ling Wen .”
“Highness, I am a literature god—that was barely innuendo.”
Xie Lian coughs. “I didn’t expect—ah, Rain Master! You’re here! Lord Rain Master!”
Taking pity, Yushi Huang steps forward. Something fascinating is happening to Ling Wen’s face. She isn’t blushing, but she’s getting very wild about the eyes.
“You summoned me,” says Yushi Huang.
“You summoned her here ?” Ling Wen mutters.
Xie Lian’s expression is back to its sunny state.
“Of course,” he says. “This saves time for everyone.” He smiles, bows to Ling Wen and Yushi Huang, and then slips from the courtyard before Ling Wen can do more than splutter.
Yushi Huang waits. It’s no hardship.
“Lord Rain Master,” Ling Wen manages, after several long, deep breaths. “Huang-mei, I wanted—”
Ling Wen’s eyes are fixed on different parts of Yushi Huang’s body. Jaw. Shoulder. Throat. Lips. A quick drop to down to her feet, then back up again. Watching how her gaze moves, the sweet surprise of the endearment still fizzing under her own skin, Yushi Huang continues to wait.
“This one has a gift for you,” Ling Wen says, soft and formal and lovely with it. “I wanted to give them to you here in case I needed to change the fit. Wait here.”
“A-Wen,” Yushi Huang says. Her throat catches, and she is left staring while Ling Wen turns on her heel and strides back into her palace, Xie Lian’s soft protests playing through her mind.
(“You didn’t need me for this….”)
Yushi Huang waits. Small birds—muted wren browns with fine traces of blue—flit through the branches of the central peach tree in Ling Wen’s courtyard. Not the right time for fruiting, and no longer stuck in full bloom, the tree is thick with yellowing leaves. A whole season's worth, just waiting to fall.
When Ling Wen returns, she holds a large box. It looks like any one of her scroll cases, except for the red silk and happiness characters tying down the lid.
Too full, Yushi Huang holds out her hands.
“It’s been a long time,” Ling Wen is saying, her own hands shaking as she lets Yushi Huang’s own close around the box. Stepping back seems to be an effort. “And I was never the best, but this—I wanted… well. You’ll see. Forgive my rudeness, Huang-mei.”
The box holds a pair of embroidered shoes, the cotton and embroidery silks dyed pale orchid greens and chrysanthemum yellow golds and the silvery grey sheens of clouds gathering over Yushi country. She looks, lip caught between her teeth, head bent, and sees tiny vegetables stitched into the heel and the uppers: carrots complete with their feathery tops; round, full turnips picked out in purple, yellow, and cream; crinkled cabbages and even a pumpkin, growing amongst its blossoms and vines.
Ling Wen clears her throat. “Please,” she says. “I need to check the fit.”
Yushi Huang blinks. “The fit,” she repeats. “You… made these.”
“For the one person in this whole place who’d be surprised,” Ling Wen says darkly, but she smiles as she draws the box out of Yushi Huang’s hands. Setting it down, she kneels beside it at Yushi Huang’s feet in a fluid, practised motion that makes them both shudder.
The Rain Master finds she can do no more than obey the soft commands to step and wait and lift, her skin burning as Ling Wen draws off the shoes she arrived in, thumbs warm at her instep and heel, careful not to tickle. A small moan escapes when Ling Wen presses her lips briefly to the inside of one ankle. They’re both flushed, and Yushi Huang wants to both squirm away and press closer, her body sending helpful memories of Ling Wen making a similar gesture with Yushi Huang rucked up against her couch.
Yushi Huang has never felt anything particular about her feet, except grateful they can hold her. She knows they are wide, strong—that they carry more calluses than even her hands. In winter, the heels crack. There is a scar across her right foot from a childhood accident she no longer knows the shape of. Nothing about her feet, even when she was smaller, and her mother still lived, and she was a princess in at least a little something more than name—is fit for either beautiful shoes or Ling Wen’s reverent touch. But Ling Wen is easing the left foot into its shoe now, then the right, her thumbs working to make sure that the heels align and none of the fabric pinches or gathers in uncomfortable ways. She is asked to place her weight forward, then back, to point her toes. And by the time Ling Wen makes a small, satisfied noise and nods once, sharp, Yushi Huang isn’t sure if she wants to sing or scream.
In the end, she laughs.
The shoes fit perfectly, and Yushi Huang reaches down so she can grip Ling Wen’s upper arms and pull her to her feet. She laughs, and Ling Wen, wide eyed, begins to laugh with her, until Yushi Huang’s hands slide down to catch Ling Wen’s in hers, and she’s kissing each palm and clever, needle-pricked fingertip.
“You are brilliant, A-Wen.”
Ling Wen clears her throat. “Yes. But only an indifferent crafts—”
“— brilliant .”
Grinning, revelling in the look of soft surprise in Ling Wen’s eyes and the strength of her own body as she lifts the woman to press her against the autumn peach tree, Yushi Huang finally kisses her exactly the way she wants, until Ling Wen is gasping into her mouth and pressing up with such breathless, pleased confidence that Yushi Huang knows she wants to build the other woman a temple. Ox will help. They’ll build it strong, and Yushi Huang’s prayers to Ling Wen, Literature God of the Heavens, will be so powerful and so frequent that Ling Wen will be able to visit Yushi country wearing any shape she feels most at home inside. She is no artist or stone carver, but Xie Lian’s young man has good ideas.
Kissing Ling Wen, Yushi Huang prays for just the right poetry for a lowly Yulong cultivator to say to a woman she loves.
