Chapter 281: A Mountain That Doesn’t Need Him

The days went by without anything happening in them, which took Xuan a while to recognize, because he hadn’t had one of those in about two years.

He got up when he woke instead of when someone came for him. He ate with the family at a table where the loudest thing was a five-year-old negotiating for more honey. He walked the grounds. He read letters from Hao about grain prices and pretended to care about grain prices. He went to bed with his wife and slept the whole way through the night, every night, without once being woken to be told that something had gone wrong somewhere.

It was, by any measure he’d have given a year ago, the best stretch of his life. He kept waiting to enjoy it properly.

The mornings he liked. He’d go down to the outer court while the frost was on the flagstones and stand at the back of the training session, and watch three dozen kids run through the opening drills of the Nine Dragons breathing form with their breath steaming.

On the third morning he stepped in.

There was a boy on the second rank whose front knee kept drifting inward on the turn, which would cost him the whole line of the form and probably a joint in ten years. Xuan opened his mouth to say so.

The drill leader got there first. A girl of maybe seventeen with a discipline sash and no patience whatsoever, who crossed the yard, tapped the boy’s knee out with her foot, and told him that the turn came from the hip and if she saw the knee do that again he’d be running the stair.

Which was correct. It was also, word for word, how Xuan had taught it to Wei Tianming, who had evidently taught it to her, who was now teaching it to a boy who had no idea where the phrasing came from.

Xuan closed his mouth and went back to standing at the wall.

He tried it again the next day, from a different angle, and got the same result. He looked for a gap in the schedule and there wasn’t one. He looked for something broken in the storehouse and Kai had already found it and fixed it, and had opinions about the salt. He asked an elder whether the outer intake needed a hand and was told, politely, that the process was in hand.

Everything he reached for, somebody else was already holding.

"You’ve got a face on," Elder Ren said, on the fourth afternoon.

The old man had taken his usual bench on the upper terrace, in the one patch of sun the mountain offered at that hour, with his one hand tucked in his sleeve.

"I don’t have a face on."

"You’ve been drifting around this mountain for days like a man who’s lost his keys." Ren nodded at the bench beside him, and Xuan took it. "Go on. Say it out loud and it’ll stop rattling."

"It runs without me."

"It does."

"I keep going down there to be useful and there’s nothing to be useful at." Xuan heard how it came out and grimaced. "Which is what I wanted. I know exactly how this sounds."

"It sounds like every patriarch I’ve ever known at about your age, and most of them were too proud to say it in daylight." Ren’s mouth twitched. "You spent years building a place that doesn’t fall over when you leave the room. Congratulations. Nobody warns you that the reward for that is standing in the room with your hands empty."

"That’s grim."

"It’s the job." The old man squinted out at the pass. "Some men find they like it. They put down roots, they run the intake, they argue about salt with their brother for thirty years and they die content, and there’s no shame in any of that. It’s a good life."

"You don’t think that’s me."

"Boy, I’ve watched you since you were nine." Ren gave a rasping sound that was as close as he came to laughing. "You are the least restful person ever to live on this rock."

He found Tianming after dark, in the lower yard, alone.

The lanterns were down to two and it was cold enough that the water in the drill barrel had skinned over, and Tianming was running the fourth form of the Seven Dragon Sword Art over and over in the dark, badly, at a level a good three steps above where he had any business working.

Xuan watched from the arch for a while before he made a sound.

"Your elbow’s dropping on the third movement."

Tianming came out of the form so fast he nearly put himself on the ground. "Senior Brother. I didn’t. It’s late, I know, I finished the schedule hours ago, I wasn’t neglecting—"

"Nobody’s accusing you of anything. Do it again."

He ran it again. The elbow dropped. Xuan walked over, took his wrist, put it where it went, and had him run the movement four times slow until it stuck.

"Where’d you get the fourth form?"

"I watched you do it." Tianming’s ears went red. "Years ago. In the old yard, before everything. I’ve been putting it together from memory."

"That’s a Foundation form. You’re not there yet."

"I know." A pause. "I’ll get there."

He said it lightly, and put the sword up, and asked, in the same light voice, whether Frostmoon disciples trained differently on their side of the pass, and if it was true they ran the winter drills barefoot on the ice, and whether the sword schools down in the capital had forms nobody up here had seen.

Then he stopped himself, apologized for talking too much, and said goodnight.

Xuan stood in the empty yard afterward with his hands in his sleeves.

’He didn’t ask,’ he told Mira.

[ He asked about four different things. He just didn’t ask the one.]

’He held this mountain by himself for a war. He’s never been off it. Not once, in his whole life.’ Xuan looked at the frozen barrel. ’And he’s out here in the dark reverse-engineering a form from something he watched me do six years ago, because that’s the only way he’s ever going to see anything new.’

[ Are you telling me, or are you working up to telling somebody else?]

’I’m thinking.’

[ You’re planning. I know the difference. You get a specific flavor when you plan, and I’ve been tasting it for three days.]

Yueyue’s verdict came at dinner, unprompted, in the way of the very young.

"You’re boring now," she announced, over the pickled greens.

Madam Lin Hua told her that was rude. Yueyue considered this and revised.

"You’re boring but I still like you," she said, which was worse, and wanted to know why he never went anywhere anymore, and whether the empress had a tiger, and whether he could fly to the capital instead of walking so she could come.

"Not on the sword. Not that far."

"Then what’s the point of the sword?"

"Ask me again in ten years."

"I’ll forget."

"You won’t," Xuan said. "You never forget anything, it’s your most alarming quality."

She thought this was the finest thing anyone had ever said about her, and spent the rest of the meal telling her mother about it.

Qingyue said nothing at all for four days, which he should have known was a countdown.

On the fifth evening she came out to the walk above the pass, where he’d gone after dinner without particularly deciding to, and stood beside him at the rail, and looked out at what he was looking at.

"That’s the fourth evening this week you’ve been out here," she said. "It might be the fifth. I lost count on the night you came out twice."

"I like the view."

"You aren’t looking at the view. You’re looking south." She let that sit for a moment. "The view is west. It’s better. There’s a whole valley of it and you haven’t glanced at the thing once."

Xuan let out a breath that fogged and thinned.

"It’s not that I’m unhappy," he said. "I want to be clear about that, because I know how this looks and I don’t want you thinking it’s about you, or about here."

"I know it isn’t."

"I’m the happiest I’ve been. That’s the honest answer. Married, whole, everybody I love breathing." He turned his hands over on the rail. "And I’ve spent five days trying to find something on this mountain that needs doing and there isn’t anything. Everything works. Everything I built works, and it works better without me standing over it, and I keep walking around looking for a fire so I can put it out."

"You’re bored."

"That’s a small word for it."

"It’s the right one." Qingyue rested her forearms on the rail. "You’ve been at war since you were sixteen. Not the fighting. The other part, the thinking three moves ahead of everyone in the room, every day, for years. And now nobody’s coming for you, and the room’s empty, and you don’t know how to be a person who isn’t outrunning something."

He looked at her.

"You’ve been thinking about this," he said.

"I’ve been married to you for a week. I’ve had time." Bone dry. "Also I’m not going to spend forty years pretending I can’t see what’s on your face. That would be exhausting for both of us and I’ve no intention of taking it up as a hobby."

"So what’s your recommendation?"

"That you stop apologizing for it." She said it without heat. "You’re not built to sit here and argue about salt with Kai, and everyone on this mountain knows it, including Kai. Whatever it is you’re circling, go and do it. I’ll be coming, obviously, so pack accordingly."

"I haven’t said there’s anything to do."

"You haven’t said a great deal." She straightened up off the rail. "Come in. It’s cold, you’ve been out here too long, and you’ve been holding a conversation with the horizon for five days, which people are starting to notice."

She went in.

Xuan stayed a minute longer at the rail with the wind coming up the pass and the whole dark line of the southern road running off the end of the valley toward country he’d never once set foot in.

’She’s not wrong,’ he said.

[ She’s rarely wrong. It’s her most irritating feature.] A pause, and something under the dryness turned careful. [ Xuan. When you’re finished being restless and you want to have a proper conversation, come and find me somewhere with a door on it.]

’That sounds ominous.’

[ I’ve been holding on to a couple of things. Nothing that had any business coming out during a wedding. But you’re standing at a rail staring south every night, and I’d rather you did that with all the information instead of half of it.]

’What kind of things?’

[ Somewhere with a door,] Mira said, and left it there.