Pei Liang — Founder of the River Fork Academy.
Pei Hao — Pei Liang's elder brother. Senior cultivator.
Wei Suyin — Head of the clinic. Zone instructor.
Wei Bolin — Zone instructor. Wei Suyin's cousin.
Luan i — Head of household operations.
Shan Pei — Militia cultivator. Bonded with the spirit beast Shu Shu.
Xu Bing — Garrison soldier assigned to Hekou.
Gao Shu — Daughter of Gao Ren, the forge master.
Zhao Jun — Son of Zhao Ping, militia field coordinator.
Pei Yan — Held in the garrison cell pending interrogation.
The first thing I did in the dark after the fires went out was count.
Xu Bing had Pei Yan in hand before I reached her. She was kneeling in the training ground dirt with two garrison soldiers behind her, the short sword taken, her hands bound at the wrist. She did not resist. She did not look at when I walked up, only at the ground.
"Hold her in the garrison cell," I said to Xu Bing. "Do not speak with her. Do not let anyone near her until I say otherwise. Send word to Commander Xu at Lanyu about what happened here tonight."
He bowed his head. "I will do it."
He took her away and I turned back to the compound.
Suyin walked the compound with a lamp and I walked behind her. She checked each person she found, pulse, breathing, eyes, and I wrote down the nas in the record book I had pulled from the curriculum room, which was the only building still standing without damage. She did not cry while she worked. She moved from body to body with her hands steady and her face closed and I wrote down what she told .
Five dead.
Duan. Gao Ren. Liu Jun. Wei Kang. Wei Lun.
Zhao Ping.
Six.
I had miscounted. I went back to the beginning of the list and counted again and arrived at the sa number and wrote it at the bottom of the page.
Suyin was kneeling beside Zhao Ping when I looked up. She had her hand on his chest and her head was bowed. I stood behind her and said nothing. After a while she stood and picked up the lamp and kept walking.
We finished the count at the fourth hour.
The compound was quiet by then, the families settled in the cultivation hall and the eastern dormitory, Xu Bing's garrison soldiers on watch at every gate. The grain depot was ash. The clinic was a fra. The garrison storage building had collapsed to its eastern wall. The sll of smoke and char was in everything, in our clothes, in our hair, in the cold air that ca off the river.
I went to where they had laid Hao against the outer wall of the cultivation hall, away from the smoke, on a blanket Luan i had brought out. His face was still gray. His breathing was shallow and he had not moved since I caught him outside the gate.
I sat beside him.
"We are going to fight together," I told him. "You do not get to leave before that."
I sat with him until the sky started to lighten. Then I went to find Wei Bolin.
Bolin was at the east dormitory doorway when I found him. He had been there most of the night, standing in the fra with his arms crossed. When I ca up beside him he did not look at .
He turned then. His eyes were dry and his voice was not.
"Why is Pei Yan in the garrison?" He said it quietly, which was worse than if he had shouted it. "She killed them. Why is she still breathing?"
"Because she has information we need."
"Information." He let the word sit there. "And none of our cultivators sensed any of this coming? With everything we have developed, all the awareness work, the ambient reading, a woman and three soldiers walked through this compound and killed six people and none of us felt it?"
"She knew the watch rotation and she struck at shift change. She was more prepared than we accounted for."
"Did you know she was being watched?"
"She was under surveillance with two soldiers assigned to her. She still managed it with help, and she used the cover of fire as a distraction."
He looked at directly. "Did you know this was going to happen?"
"I suspected her. I did not know the Qinghe soldiers were already embedded in the clan group. That was the piece I missed."
The quiet stretched between us. Bolin's hands were fists at his sides.
"If this is what cultivation has given us," he said, "the ability to be blindsided by a woman and three soldiers while we passed water buckets, then we are weak. All of us. Everything you have taught here is not enough."
He walked away before I could answer.
I stood at the dormitory doorway and my fists closed at my sides and I looked at the ground. Six people in the ground because I had moved too slowly.
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We will never let this happen again.
The first day was labor.
We dug the graves on the south side of the compound, outside the wall, in the ground that faced the river. Zhao Lin organized the digging, six sites marked out and asured, the work rotating through every man in the compound who could hold a shovel. Ma and Tao worked from before sunrise until the light was gone. Xu Bing rotated his garrison soldiers through it between watch shifts without being asked.
The bodies we prepared in the cultivation hall. Suyin led that work with Luan i and three of the older won from the Luan household. They worked through the morning and into the afternoon. When it was done each person was wrapped in the best cloth available, which was not very good cloth, but it was what we had.
Gao Shu sat outside the hall doors the entire day. She would not go in and she would not leave. Shan Pei sat beside her and said nothing and Shu Shu lay across both their laps, larger now than she had been before the fires, her presence a warmth that reached further than her body suggested it should.
I checked on Hao every two hours. His color had not changed. His pulse remained shallow.
I sat with him at the midday al and did not eat and told him what we had done that morning and what we would do the next day. I do not know why I told him. It felt like keeping an account. Like if I kept a clear record of everything that had happened and was happening, I could present it to him when he woke and he would be able to see that I had kept it together.
I went back to work.
The second day I sent the Pei clan arrivals to begin clearing the burned buildings. It was necessary work and it kept their hands occupied and their eyes focused on sothing with a practical end. The clinic fra ca down in the afternoon. The grain depot site was cleared by evening. We would rebuild, but not yet. First the ground had to be clean.
Suyin ca to at the end of the second day. She sat down beside at the river where I had gone after the work was done.
For a long ti neither of us said anything.
We had both been holding ourselves straight for two days. Every conversation, every task, every person who needed direction had gotten a version of us that was upright and functional. Now there was no one watching. I felt it in my shoulders first, the tension releasing without permission, and I heard her exhale beside , long and shaking.
She pressed her face into my shoulder and I put my arm around her and she held on.
"I kept trying," she said, her voice uneven. "I kept — every one of them, I tried. I had my hands on them and I tried and I—" She stopped. Her breath ca in short. "There was nothing there to bring back. I could not — my hands couldn't—"
She couldn't finish it.
I held her tighter and said nothing because there was nothing to say. She was a healer who had walked through her compound in the dark with a lamp and placed her hands on six people and felt each of them already gone. The Mother's Touch had nothing to offer the dead. She knew that. She had always known that. It did not make the night any easier to carry.
After a while the worst of it passed. She stayed where she was, her head on my shoulder.
"I want to say sothing at the burial," I said quietly. "I do not know if it will hold anyone together. But I want to try."
She lifted her head and looked at , eyes wet, still present.
"There will be fractures between the clans, but we have to stay strong. We just…we just have to…”
She took my hand and held it to her chest, and I felt her warmth radiate outward as it always did.
We sat with the river moving in front of us until the cold pulled at us. Then she stood and I stood with her, her hand still in mine.
We walked back through the dark together and neither of us let go until we reached the gate.
The compound gathered at the south wall in the early morning, the full population of Hekou. Luan cousins and Pei arrivals and garrison soldiers and the children who were old enough to stand still and the ones who were not old enough held in their mothers' arms. Gao Shu stood at the front between Shan Pei and Luan i. Zhao Jun stood three steps back from his father's grave and did not move.
I stood at the head of the six graves and looked at the people in front of .
"We lost six people," I said. "I am going to say their nas out loud because they deserve to be nad here, in this ground, in this village that they helped build."
I said each na. After each one I paused and let the silence hold it.
"Duan ran the dawn session before the sun rose and after it set and he never once asked us to thank him for it. He fought with a broken body and he did not stop fighting. Wei Kang and Wei Lun gave everything they had to this place without being asked twice. Liu Jun tended every wound and every illness in this compound with more patience than most of us have ever managed to find. Zhao Ping kept this ground safe. Gao Ren built what we needed to survive out of raw material and hard work, and he refused to run when he should have run, because that was who he was."
I looked at the graves.
"So villages would scatter after a night like that one. So would load their carts and find sowhere quieter, and there would be no sha in it. Those who feel that pull, I understand it.”
I looked at the people.
"But we are not going to scatter. We are going to bury our dead in this ground because this is the village they helped build. We are going to rebuild what was burned and strengthen what was not. We are going to make sure that what they gave to this place is not wasted."
I stepped back.
Luan i began the burial song. The others joined in, gradually at first, then fully, until the sound was larger than any one voice.
I stood at Hao's side. He had been carried out on a stretcher and laid beside the gathering, propped up so he faced the graves, which felt important even if he could not see them. I put my hand on his shoulder.
"Six people," I told him quietly, under the song. "We are going to make sure it does not happen again."
The graves were filled as the sun ca fully up. The sound of the shovels and the song mixed together and the river ran behind all of it and when it was done the ground was flat and marked with stones and the people stood there for a long ti before anyone moved.
I stood with them.
Then I went back inside and began writing the new watch rotation.
Suyin found still at the desk past the second watch.
"I cannot sleep," she said from the doorway.
I set the brush down.
She ca in and sat on the mat against the wall and drew her knees up and looked at the lamp. I moved from the desk and sat beside her. After a while she leaned against my shoulder and her breathing started to shake and I put my arm around her and let her cry. She did not try to stop it. She cried for her brothers the way she had not allowed herself to cry in front of anyone since the night of the attack, deep and quiet, and I held her and said nothing because there was nothing to say.
When it passed she did not pull away. She stayed where she was, her head on my shoulder, her hand in mine.
"I keep thinking I could have done sothing different," she said. "If I had been at the clinic instead of in bed—"
"You would have been killed with Liu Jun."
She was quiet.
"There was nothing you could have done," I said. "Nothing any of us could have done by the ti she moved. We were already behind."
She turned her face into my shoulder. I felt her exhale slowly. We were like that for awhile, huddled together in the dark. My mind drifted to Hao’s children and his wives and I wondered…who was going to look after them now? Worry about after invaded my thoughts, and they kept building until I finally laid my eyes on Suyin and realized that this life, like any other, was fleeting, and I had to make the most of it.
"Marry ," I said to her.
She pulled back slightly and looked up at in shock.
"What?"
"Marry ."
She lifted her head and looked at . Her eyes were still wet. She looked at my face for a long ti like she was trying to determine if I was serious.
"Now?" she asked. "You are asking now?"
"I…I just need you beside and I need you to know that I want it to be permanent."
She looked at for another long mont. Then she leaned up and pressed her lips to mine soft in a soft and tender embrace, then she rested her forehead against my jaw.
"You could have waited until the morning," she whispered.
"I thought about it."
She turned and lay down on the mat and pulled my arm over her. I lay behind her and felt her breathing slow with a sigh of comfort.
I closed my eyes.
Neither of us let go of each other.
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