Chương 2Chapter 2: Hands That See

Chapter 2: Hands That See

For most people in the Verdant Beast Sect, the day began with meditation at dawn.

For Lin Xiaoyu, it began with Hong’er trying to steal her hair ribbon.

“Stop that,” Xiaoyu muttered, swatting blind at the warm, rustling shape near her head. “It’s not food. You’ve known it’s not food for two years.”

Hong’er chittered — a flame-tailed fox the size of a cat, with a voice like crackling twigs and a heart that smelled of toasted chestnuts. She nudged Xiaoyu’s hand with a damp nose, indignant, then curled around her shoulders like a living scarf for the walk down from the servants’ loft.

People thought Xiaoyu’s world was darkness.

People were, as usual, missing the point.

Her world was loud. The sect at dawn was a market of sounds and smells: disciples’ qi humming at different pitches — proud ones rang like struck bronze, nervous ones buzzed like flies. The kitchens smelled of ginger and smoke. The beast yards smelled of hay and warm fur and iron.

She could tell the junior disciples apart by their footsteps. She could tell which senior sister had quarreled with her lover by the thin, sour note in her qi. She could tell it would rain by noon because old Gui Lao, the pond turtle, was hauling himself out of the water with the slow, creaking dignity of a two-hundred-year-old deciding a thing once and for all.

What she could not tell was what was written on the notice board. Or what anyone’s face looked like. Or why the ninth yard existed.

That part was new.

“You’re humming again,” Hong’er said — not in words. Beasts rarely spoke in words. Hong’er spoke in a ripple of mine mine warm bun? that Xiaoyu felt behind her ribs.

“I am not,” Xiaoyu lied.

“You hum when you’re nervous. And you’re carrying our supper in your sleeve.”

“Your supper is bugs. You catch your own.”

The fox made a scandalized noise.

Xiaoyu’s chores took her across the whole sect: sweep the outer court, carry feed to the second yard, muck the third. The third yard was Zhao Feng’s territory in the mornings.

“Watch it, scarecrow,” someone said as she passed, and stuck a foot out.

Old habit saved her. She heard the shift of cloth, felt the draft of a movement, and hopped neatly over the leg. She’d been learning obstacles by ear since she was six. The disciple who’d tripped her — a boy named Deng — laughed too loudly.

“Careful, Deng,” Bai Xue said from nearby. Her voice was soft, and her qi smelled of clean snow and ink. “If you trip the girl who carries your feed buckets, your beasts go hungry.”

“Senior Sister Bai, I was only—”

“Go and muck your own stall.”

There was a shuffle and Deng went. Bai Xue fell into step beside Xiaoyu, taking one of the feed buckets without being asked.

“You shouldn’t let them,” Bai Xue said.

“Let them what?” Xiaoyu said. “I’ve fallen in every ditch in this sect. Twice. I know them all personally now. We’re friends.”

Bai Xue laughed — a real laugh, startled out of her. “You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it a joke so nobody has to feel bad about it.” The buckets clanked as they walked. “I heard about yesterday. The boar king. Zhao Feng hasn’t shut up about it — says you must have fed it a calming pill beforehand. Was it true? Did you?”

“Do I look like someone who can afford calming pills?”

“No,” Bai Xue admitted. “You look like someone who shares her supper with a fox.”

Hong’er made a smug sound.

At the crane pool, Xue Yu — Bai Xue’s white crane, taller than Xiaoyu, with a vanity that smelled of peonies — unfolded one elegant leg and inspected the arriving humans with disdain. Then it saw Xiaoyu, and its whole elegant posture melted. It waded over and pressed its long neck against her cheek.

“Pretty voice,” it sent, in the cool, fluting way of birds. “Sing the wobbly song.“

“Not in front of your master, you’ll embarrass us both.”

Bai Xue sighed. “My own contracted beast likes you more than me. Do you know how that feels?”

“Like being very lovable?” Xiaoyu suggested.

The day blurred into chores. At noon it rained, exactly as Gui Lao had predicted, and Xiaoyu ate her rice under the eaves and gave Hong’er the pickled greens because Hong’er would otherwise steal them anyway and pretend she’d been given them.

In the afternoon Elder Mo found her re-bedding the marten pens. He stood for a while — she knew his step, the dragging left foot, and the smell of medicinal oil he rubbed into his bad knee — just listening to her work.

“You have a gift with them,” he said at last. It was not praise. His voice had the flat, careful tone of a man setting down something heavy and breakable. “Yesterday wasn’t luck, was it?”

“I just listened,” Xiaoyu said.

“Most tamers shout louder when a beast won’t obey. You’ve never shouted in your life.” He shifted his weight. The knee creaked. “Listen to me, girl. In this sect, a gift that nobody understands makes people nervous. Nervous people reach for talismans. Keep your head down a while. Sweep. Hum a little less where the senior disciples can hear.”

“Yes, Elder.”

“And stay away from the eighth yard after dark.”

Her hands stilled in the straw. “Why? There’s nothing in the eighth yard but the old boars.”

“Because what’s past the eighth yard listens back,” Elder Mo said, “and I am too old to pull you out of whatever conversation you’ve started.” He walked away before she could answer, his dragging step loud in the quiet pen, and Xiaoyu stood there with straw in her fists and her heart slamming, wondering how much the old man knew — and how long he had known it.

All day, underneath the work, a thought kept circling.

Night in the sect was different. The disciples went to their meditation chambers. The yards quieted. The beasts settled into the great, slow dreaming that rolled off them in waves — hunger-dreams, flight-dreams, den-dreams.

Xiaoyu waited until the bell for the third watch, then slipped out of the loft with the cloth bundle of buns in her sleeve and Hong’er silent on her shoulder.

The eighth yard smelled of old iron and sleep. The wall beyond it — the ninth yard’s wall — buzzed with warding script.

Xiaoyu stopped three paces from the wall. Her heart was beating so hard she was sure it would wake the whole mountain.

“I brought food,” she whispered. “I don’t know if— I mean, you’re three thousand years old. Do you even eat buns?”

Silence.

Then, from the other side of the wall: the slow clink of chains. A sound like a house settling. And that voice again, inside her skull, dry as old paper.

“You sound surprised.”

The gate was iron, set into the wall. Xiaoyu crouched and felt along its bottom edge. Her fingers found a gap barely wide enough. Something huge shifted on the other side — she felt the ground breathe — and then, impossibly gentle for its size, a claw hooked the cloth bundle and drew it through.

Sounds of eating. Unhurried. Almost — polite.

Xiaoyu bristled. “Those were my dinner!”

She thought about it honestly. The night air smelled of rain-wet stone and beast musk.

“Because you sounded lonely,” she said. “And because everyone keeps saying you’re just a dog, and you’re clearly not, and I wanted to know what you actually are.”

For a long moment there was only the sound of chains.

“Then I’ll be careful and hungry,” Xiaoyu said. Her knees were shaking, but her voice wasn’t. “What’s your name? Your real one. Not ‘dog.'”

The presence on the other side of the wall went very still.

Somewhere above them, on the patrol path, a lantern swung and a disciple’s boots crunched on gravel, coming closer.

“Tomorrow,” Xiaoyu whispered, scrambling back into the shadows of the eighth yard. “Same time. I’ll bring something warm.”

Behind the wall, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it, the ancient thing said a word that might have been its name — or might have been a warning.

She would have to come back to find out which.