Song i’s hands tightened on her shoulders.
The elder sister looked at Cang. Looked back at her sister. The expression that moved across her face in the interval was a complicated country—protective fury, the specific guilt of soone who had sent help in a form that had its own consequences, and sothing underneath both that she was clearly attempting to bury.
"He—" she started.
"She is my concubine," Cang said. Not rudely. Not with the theatrical cruelty of the previous night. Simply a statent of fact, the kind that closes a discussion by removing its premise.
Xiao Hua went very still.
Song i’s head snapped toward him.
"She is my sister," Song i said, voice dropping to a register Xiao Hua had only heard twice in her life—once when a rchant tried to cheat them, once when their father had raised his hand. "She is nineteen years old and she was betrothed to—"
"She was betrothed to the rchant’s son," Cang said. "Who was using his betrothal to assault her before the ceremony was complete. I dealt with the son. The betrothal is dissolved." A pause. "You’re welco."
"I didn’t say thank—"
"You were about to."
Song i’s mouth closed. Her eyes were doing sothing furious and complicated.
"She ca to no harm," Cang added, which was technically true in the sense that a physician would use the term and technically incomplete in every other sense.
Xiao Hua, who had a firsthand account of how accurate that statent was, said nothing.
A sound ca from the treeline to the right.
Not footsteps. The forest simply parted, the way it does for things that belong to it, and Zhen Ying erged from the shadow of an old pine wearing the unhurried expression of a woman who had heard everything from fifty ters away and had taken her ti arriving anyway.
Her human form was the kind of presence that announced itself before she’d said a word. Tall—taller than average—with the full, architectural curves of a body that had been alive for three centuries and had decided at so point that restraint was a concept for lesser species. Wide hips. Waist that pulled inward before expanding upward into a chest that moved with its own gravitational authority. White skin. Dark hair in a loose coil over one shoulder. The left arm that had not existed ninety years ago flexed easily at her side as she walked, fully real, healed by a man whose dical ability she had not yet entirely processed.
Her eyes found iling.
iling, who had been standing quietly against her tree since the landing, attempting to reassemble her dignity from available materials, straightened automatically under the weight of that gaze.
It was not a hostile look. It was, in so ways, more unsettling than hostility. It was the look of sothing very old sizing up sothing very much smaller and finding the exercise faintly interesting.
"New one," Zhen Ying said. Not to Cang. To iling directly, which was sohow worse.
iling’s chin ca up. Fourteen years of managing a rchant household. Fourteen years of cultivating the particular composure of a woman who had never been able to show weakness without it being used. "I don’t know who you are."
"I know." Zhen Ying smiled. It was a perfectly pleasant smile with an edge to it that moved like a scale catching light. "But I know what you are. You sll like him."
iling’s face went carefully blank.
"Who is she?" Zhen Ying glanced at Cang with the mild inquiry of a First Wife performing her own roster audit.
"rchant’s wife," Cang said. "iling."
"rchant’s forr wife," Zhen Ying corrected.
iling opened her mouth.
"iling," Cang said, not looking at her, "is mine. She’ll be adjusting to the arrangent."
"I can see she’s already well into the adjustnt," Zhen Ying observed, gaze moving from the disordered silk to the faint marks at iling’s collarbone to the precise quality of her posture—the standing of a woman whose hips were still protesting last night’s education. "She’s carrying yourself already?"
"Not yet. Today."
iling made a sound that began as an objection and arrived as sothing breathless and failed entirely to beco a sentence.
"How dare you."
Song i had turned from her sister.
She was looking at Cang now with the full force of an elder sister who had connected several dots and did not like the picture they assembled. Her voice was controlled. Her hands were not. They had closed at her sides with the slow, helpless fist of soone who understood the power differential perfectly and was furious about it anyway.
"She is nineteen," she said. "She was a virgin two days ago and you just—you brought her here from a wedding night and you’re standing there and telling she’s—" The word stuck. She tried a different approach. "She is my sister. Mine. I protected her from—"
"You protected her very well," Cang said. "She was about to be forced by a rchant’s son with a fondness for hired n. Your protection got her to ."
"That’s not—that isn’t what I—"
"Song i."
Her na, in that voice, had a quality. She had noticed this before. She had been noticing it since the mountain stream, since the cave, since the morning in the hot spring when she’d woken to find herself entangled with a serpent matriarch and a cultivator who had sohow arranged the entire world around himself while she slept. It was not commanding. It did not shout. It simply settled over her like a hand on the back of the neck—firm, warm, specific.
Her next word did not co.
Cang stepped toward her.
Song i stepped back.
He closed the distance without rushing, and she ran out of backward space at the treeline, and when his hand ca up to her jaw she made a sharp, indignant sound that was intended to be a refusal and arrived as sothing with considerably more helplessness in it than she had planned.
"She’s mine," he said quietly. "The sa as you are mine. That makes her safe."
"That doesn’t an—"
His fingers threaded into her hair. Her breath caught.
"It ans exactly that," he said, and tilted her head.
Xiao Hua watched her elder sister’s face change.
She had been watching Song i her entire life—had mapped every expression her sister owned, from the stubborn set of her jaw when she was protecting sothing to the soft helpless openness of her face when she cried. She had never seen this expression.
The precise instant when the argunt left her features and was replaced by sothing that had no armor in it at all—a yielding that was not defeat because it was not unwilling.
His mouth ca down on Song i’s.
It was not gentle. It was not rough. It was thorough—the kind of kiss that operates on the premise that the other person’s thoughts are simply a problem being solved, and solves them efficiently.
Song i’s hands, which had been raised between them in the last position of protest, flattened against his chest.
Her eyes closed.
Her head tilted back.
The sound that ca from her throat was very small. Private. The sound of a door being opened from the inside.
Xiao Hua was staring.
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