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“You must be more careful, Lan-er-gongzi,” the physician is saying, from somewhere above Lan Wangji’s left shoulder. Lan Wangji doesn’t say anything. There is a quiet, wet sound as she peels away the last layer of blood and lymph-soaked padding from his back, and she makes a sharp tick sound with her tongue, the universal noise of a physician severely displeased. Wangji has never been given that noise before. He is normally an excellent patient, quiet and compliant and quick to heal, but he remembers overhearing rather a lot of it during the Sunshot Campaign.
Wei Ying—
He focuses on the fire lacing his back and listens to the physician. He knows her name, but the fire and the exhaustion and the howling black cavern in his chest are too distracting to allow him to remember.
“You have ripped open the wounds and undone much of the healing,” she is saying crisply. He does not say obviously. “You will be bedridden again for a week. Two, if you persist in being a fool.” He does not say that there is nothing for him to do. Her voice sharpens, as if she thinks he is ignoring him. “You should lift nothing heavier than a cup of tea until you are given clearance by a physician.”
Wangji opens his eyes, his cheek resting on the cot, and looks up at her, keeping his face stony and still.
“Are you listening to me, Hanguang-jun?” the physician demands, barking his title at him like another whip strike. He blinks once, slowly. “If you do anything like that again—like whatever you did—you will be lucky not to lose function permanently. You will already be scarred for life, why would you ever risk worse? Cultivators have taken infection and died of fewer lashes than you took.”
He does not answer. His eyes drift to the screen hiding the other half of the room, instead.
“Please focus,” the physician says, snapping her fingers in his face. “The boy will live. He is sick in the way of children, all flash and fire. A week of good meals and doting will see him healthy as a spring colt and twice as energetic. Will you be still and stay in bed, if we keep him here for observation?”
Wangji swallows and speaks for the first time since his brother lifted little A-Yuan from his arms, when he murmured only my son through the haze of blood-red pain.
“Yes.”
The physician softens, just faintly. “He’s a sweet boy, I’m sure,” she says.
He is. He is the only sweet thing left in the world. He is thin as a reed and nearly as quiet, with hands that clung weakly to Wangji’s white sleeves and long hair that is dirty and matted, with child-soft skin that blazed feverish against the cold pain-sweat at the curve of Wangji’s throat as he carried him. He is the last remainder of the grinning boy who broke half the rules of Cloud Recesses just to get a few words out of Wangji, and—
And he is a Wen. The very last of the Wen remnants.
If they take him out of Wangji’s line of sight, further afield than behind a privacy screen, no physician is keeping him in bed. He is supposed to be in seclusion, has already broken it once to go to the Burial Mounds, but he will not allow Wen Yuan, A-Yuan, the final relic of Wei Ying’s great heart, to be taken away and killed quietly.
He is aware that he may be somewhat feverish himself, that Lan Xichen certainly thought he was delirious with pain when he returned from his trip to the Burial Mounds. He feels as far from delirium as possible, as if the world has been drawn in flat and merciless black ink around him, but the case could be made, if someone felt inclined. It doesn’t matter. Until Wangji has his brother’s word that Lan Yuan, son of Hanguang-jun, will be safe in Cloud Recesses, he intends to keep the boy close.
He breathes, shallow and steady, as the physician cleans the wounds on his back with salt water that burns more fiercely than the whip did, as she smears ointment on it to draw out the heat of infection and ease the pain, as she binds it tight to hold the damaged skin in place. The latter is the worst—he must sit up. He does, back as straight as a rod, and stares flatly at her when she tries to make him face in any direction except toward the screen hiding A-Yuan. He bears the pain in silence, and breathes.
“Well done, Hanguang-jun,” she says, gruffly kind, as she guides him back down onto the cot, stretched on his front with a pillow for his head. Under other circumstances, Wangji thinks that it would be uncomfortable. Now it is—nothing. It is nothing. The pain in his back is nothing, too. She shouldn’t praise him for withstanding the treatment. He can barely connect the sensation with the idea of reacting to it.
The physician leaves him alone to rest, with instructions to meditate if he cannot sleep, and Wangji does neither. He doesn’t know what he does do. He simply floats, lips sealed together as if he were a disobedient child to be silenced, and focuses on his breathing until the hollow in his chest is making a thin noise in his ears, like a dizi inexpertly played on its highest note. Reality dims around him, like he’s drifting away from his body, a boat unmoored and carried into the fog by a river current.
The sun sets and rises. A physician comes, speaks to him in words too muddied by distance to make out, leaves again. He thinks that he cries, some time in the night. Lan Xichen comes briefly in the morning, murmurs with the rhythm of a stream over stone, braids Wangji’s hair as if he were a child, leaves.
A-Yuan cries. It is the only sound with meaning. He cries in the restless choked waves of a child beyond hope of relief, who believes that crying is all that is left to him. Sometimes it ebbs into silence and he sleeps, drawn down by the fever. Sometimes he calls for someone who will never return, half-awake and confused. The physicians’ murmuring is wordless as birdsong, but Wangji thinks they are confused. The child is distraught beyond reason and will not be soothed, only cries and cries until he falls asleep, and wakes himself again with weeping.
Lan Wangji lies still and listens and is grateful for the sound, insofar as he is anything. He remembers, as brittle and painfully clear as everything else about the past days, the faint noise of rasping breath, beyond the talismans, inside the dead tree. Sick and weak and alone, A-Yuan had been encircled by every ward his gege could write down, hidden from anyone who didn’t know exactly what to look for. Wangji had known a dull twist of anguish, beyond the haze of his wounds and the broken-glass grind of his heart, at the idea that Wei Ying’s desperate attempt to protect the boy he had loved so fiercely might keep Wangji out entirely and condemn both of them.
Talismans do not need to be fed constantly by their caster, and Wei Ying has—had—always written the best Wangji has ever seen—they had done their duty without so much as weakening. But when Wangji put a shaking palm to the invisible wall, Bichen more crutch than weapon, and breathed please, the barrier had evaporated under his hand. The talismans are gone—burned up with the removal of their treasure—and A-Yuan is safe and Wangji might never know why Wei Ying’s masterwork of a safehouse allowed him inside. He cannot ask.
But he can listen, as A-Yuan cries, and know that he cries because he is alive. Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Patriarch, has achieved one more impossibility, and he is crying just beyond the screen, and if Wangji cannot be relieved, if his chest is too full of glass and his head is too full of fog to be glad, he can at least be bitterly, spitefully grateful.
“He needs sleep,” a physician is saying on the other side of the screen, urgently, and Lan Wangji blinks slowly. The words are words again. It has been—some time, he thinks, since his wounds were rewrapped, since words were words. Two days, maybe? He has begun to lose track in the fog. It is dark outside, and A-Yuan is quiet. “He needs sleep, real sleep, and food, and he can’t get either while he keeps weeping like this. What happened to him?”
“What happened to any of us, Lihua-qianbei,” another voice says dryly. “Did you sleep through the war?” A pause, then a covert whisper. “Do you think that’s why Hanguang-jun brought him here? Maybe his mother—”
“It is forbidden,” the first voice says sharply—too loud, Wangji thinks wearily, “to speak about others behind their backs. And it is foolish to do so when those others are also in the infirmary.”
There is a pitiful whimper, and a mumbled “Gege?”
“Oh, baobei,” the senior physician says in a hopeless murmur, too late to keep her patient asleep. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
“Gege?” A-Yuan whispers again, all the voice left to him. “Qing-jie? Where baba?”
The physicians hush him, murmur soothing nothings, try too hard to hide that they don’t have answers, and A-Yuan moans, a desperate exhausted noise as if at the end of his energy.
“Some water, xiao Yuan, you’ll feel better,” the junior physician says, cajoling, weary. “Sit up, sit up—catch him!”
For a moment, Wangji thinks that A-Yuan has mercifully fainted again, so that he might slip back into sleep, but then he hears a hoarse wail, more cat than child, and unsteady footsteps. Of course. After everything—the disappearance of his family, the loss of the only father he had, the cage of talismans, the massacre of his people, the days of being tended by strangers—A-Yuan has finally tried to escape.
“A-Yuan.”
The voice sounds nothing like Wangji’s own, but it vibrates pain from his back like notes from taut strings and so it must be. He sounds as thin and voiceless as A-Yuan, barely audible to him across the vast distance to his body.
The boy reels toward him anyway. He stumbles in the dark, already crying again, but reaches hot, fever-clammy hands out and catches Wangji’s elbow.
“Xian-gege? Baba?”
“No,” Wangji says. The word aches. “A-Yuan. I am sorry.”
“Rich-gege? Baba come back?”
“No,” Wangji says. He tries to form the name, tries to say Xian-gege for this broken boy at his bedside, can’t. “He cannot come back.”
He has not said the words yet. He cannot, please, the world cannot make him say the words. The pain in his chest wells up like black water, like poison, like he has tried to breathe the cold springs and is drowning in their frigid grip. Even thinking the words, thinking Wei Ying is dead, makes him want to weep as long and helplessly as A-Yuan. “I am sorry,” he repeats instead.
A-Yuan, who has lost at least two sets of parents to war, maybe more—a child of a war camp, passed from hand to hand as they died—sinks to the floor and puts his face to Wangji’s arm and sobs.
“Hanguang-jun,” the senior physician says, holding a glowing talisman and rushing forward, wide-eyed. “I am—my apologies, er-gongzi, the boy is feverish, he has been seeing things—”
“Let him stay,” Wangji says.
“Hanguang-jun—”
Wangji does not have the energy to make his face and voice show anything but cold carved jade, but he glances up at her. “Let him stay.”
“I—yes,” she says helplessly. He realizes, slowly, that she is afraid that his brother will be angry. He should say something to reassure her. Instead, he slowly shifts his arm so that his hand rests in A-Yuan’s lap, and waits for the sobs to ease. Then, breathing shallow against the pain, he slides aside to clear a tiny space on the edge of his cot, just big enough, perhaps, for a very young, very small child.
Still sniffling, A-Yuan creeps onto the cot with him, and Wangji tucks his arm around the shaking chest—so thin, so fragile—at an awkward angle.
“All gone,” A-Yuan rasps into Wangji’s shoulder. “All gone.”
Yes, Wangji has just enough presence of mind not to say. Instead he lies still and feels A-Yuan slip back into a restless sleep, and allows himself to slip back into the fog.
In the morning, A-Yuan is still asleep, a firebrand along Wangji’s side. It is the longest he has slept since Wangji brought him back. The physicians are loathe to wake him, and Wangji does not find that he cares when his arm goes numb, when his shoulder begins to send shooting pains through his bandaged back. Words stop mattering again, the world ebbing into a blurred and empty version of itself, and Wangji drifts, and A-Yuan sleeps.
The sun rises, sets. Wangji’s physician rewraps his back again, barks a reprimand he lets slip past him as meaningless as wind, leaves. Xichen comes and speaks and leaves. A-Yuan sleeps. The sun rises, sets. Wangji surfaces from the fog to understand that A-Yuan’s fever breaks on the second day. The physicians murmur together like birds chirping, and leave him alone, curled into Wangji.
A-Yuan wakes on the third day, the fifth day since Wangji brought him out of the Burial Mounds, and he does not know any of them.
He does not recognize his physicians. He does not seem to remember how he came to be here. He does not remember that he has been sick. And most critical, most relieving, most crushing, he does not cry for anyone at all.
A-Yuan is reluctant to leave Wangji, although he seems to know very little save for his own name and certainly does not seem to recognize the man he once cheerfully called Rich-gege. He is coaxed away with water and broth and the promise of placing his cot near Hanguang-jun’s, so that they can get better together, doesn’t that sound good, xiao Yuan?
The endearment that all the physicians use—there must be a disciple named Yuan, although Wangji cannot muster the interest to remember—sounds wrong. A-Yuan frowns mildly at it, confused but cooperative, and Wangji closes his eyes as the small body slips away.
He doesn’t know how much later it is, that he stirs and opens his eyes to see Xichen kneeling on the floor by the head of his cot. His brother is watching him with an uncommonly solemn look, his kind smile not in evidence, and Wangji blinks slowly, meets his eyes.
Xichen speaks, and seems to grasp within a sentence that Wangji is not listening.
“Lan Zhan,” Xichen says sternly, and that, that gets through, strikes a chord from the depths of the emptiness that makes Wangji flinch internally. It strips away the fog, and Wangji closes his eyes briefly against the pain of it. His brother sees, even through his stillness, and his faces softens. “Wangji,” he says instead, softer. “Didi.”
He has not called Wangji didi since before—before. Before the Burial Mounds, before the Wens, before the war. Before everything.
“Mm?” Wangji says. He is so tired. He wants—not sleep. He wants more than sleep. He wants to be done.
“Your physician says that you are not resting.” Xichen’s fingers brush a stray lock of hair back behind Wangji’s ear. “Your back is not healing as it should be.”
Wangji’s eyes have slipped closed again, somewhere during his brother’s words, and Xichen touches his cheek, directs a light shock of spiritual energy to force him alert again. Xichen’s qi is like clear cool water, and the touch of it brings up muddy memories of the fog, of Xichen speaking words that made no sense and resting his fingers on Wangji’s meridians. Wangji thinks, distantly, that it should concern him, that he did not notice.
“Didi,” Xichen says. “Please, it’s been eight days since—since you brought A-Yuan back. You meditated after the whip, why not do it now if you can’t sleep? It would help speed your recovery. It would ease your heart.”
“It is forbidden to lie,” Wangji murmurs, barely a breath, but still the longest sentence he has said since he lost consciousness under the whip. Xichen laughs, and the sound breaks terribly in the middle, and for the first time, dimly, Wangji sees that his brother’s eyes are wet.
“A-Yuan is recovering,” Xichen says, returning to his steady stroking of Wangji’s hair. He reaches out and begins passing energy into Wangji’s core with the other hand, and the cool touch eases the brilliant pain of the lash marks, somewhat. “The physicians say he should be well enough to leave the infirmary in a few days, although his memories may never return. He may remember when he is older and—able to bear them, or he may not. Who is he, Wangji?”
“My son,” Wangji says flatly, the same answer he gave when Xichen took A-Yuan from him. It is not a lie. It will not be a lie. He will make it not a lie. And here, in the infirmary, with physicians in and out and A-Yuan asleep on a cot not ten paces away, he will not say anything else.
Xichen’s stroking hand pauses, resumes. “Didi…”
Wangji reaches up to seize Xichen’s hand by the wrist, breaking the tenuous link of qi between them, and he becomes aware of the weakness in his own fingers. He dimly recalls being made to drink during the last eight days, and assumes that some of it must have been broth rather than water, but he hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, hasn’t meditated. He probably couldn’t stand even if he needed to.
His voice is still hard when he speaks again.
“A-Yuan is my son.”
“All right,” Xichen whispers. He wraps his own hand over Wangji’s, bent to keep Wangji’s arm from pulling at his back. “All right. I—I’ll put him in the records. Lan Yuan. Which Yuan?”
The thought surfaces, slow as air rising through honey, a bright point of pain bursting to the forefront of Wangji’s mind, that he never asked. He has no idea which character Wei Ying would have used, writing Wen Yuan in his cramped calligraphy. The boy won’t know. Wangji doesn’t even know if he can read, let alone write his own name, and with his memory in tatters, it’s a moot point anyway.
“Something to write, xiongzhang,” Wangji says after far too long. His hands are clumsy, and it’s difficult to write from the cot, but he carefully inscribes a character—wish. It’s all he can think of. Xichen doesn’t comment on the obvious moment of uncertainty.
“All right,” Xichen says again. “Lan Yuan. Son of Hanguang-jun. His mother?” Wangji shuts his eyes for a moment and Xichen, his perfect brother, doesn’t need more of an answer. Xichen probably has an idea of the truth—he’s known Wangji too long to believe that he might actually have a child of his own blood, or that he might leave that child to the mercy of war—but he doesn’t say anything. He just makes a soothing noise and peels Wangji’s hand from his wrist. “An orphan of war,” Xichen says, in his calm, steady political voice, the one he uses when he’s making plans or negotiating with other sect leaders. “Adopted out of a minor Lan house destroyed in the campaign, after the death of his mother. Will that serve, didi?”
“Mm,” Wangji agrees, looking up at Xichen.
“Good,” Xichen murmurs, palming the drying page and slipping it into his sleeve. “Good.” He stops, then, hesitates, and takes Wangji’s hand in his own again, wrapping both palms around it. Wangji feels the sword callouses on his brother’s hands and thinks about seeing Lan Xichen, the brother he idolized, the man who raised him, holding his tongue as the Wen remnants were cut down in their dozens, holding a sword against the man Wangji loved. Loves.
It is not the worst pain Wangji feels, in this moment, a tiny thing against the greater void of a sunlight smile and steel-eyed resolve. But it is bitter in a way all its own.
“Wangji,” Xichen says softly. “You must rest.” And then, damn him for his sharp eyes and sharper mind, Xichen says, “A-Yuan will want to hug his father.”
Wangji draws a long breath that splits the delicate scabbing on his back and sends a fresh trickle of blood seeping into his bandages, and lets it out in a slow gust.
He cannot lie here and drift in the fog forever. He has duties. He has a son. He has Wei Ying’s son, Wei Ying’s last miracle, and it does not matter how desperately Wangji wants to simply drift away into the dark, to see if he can find sunlight there. He has to continue.
“Yes,” Wangji says, weary. “He will.”
The tears that spill down his face are scalding, so hot they might be leaving burns behind. Wangji doesn’t know how long he cries, silent and aching sobs, while Xichen strokes his hair and wipes his face without regard for his fine silk robes. Lan Yuan, unaware of his adoption, unaware of his life overwritten with a safer falsehood, sleeps undisturbed.
Eventually, for the first time in far longer than eight days, so does Lan Wangji.
Wangji heals. He meditates. He speaks out loud to his brother and listens when he’s told of A-Yuan’s recovery and faces his uncle with his best stone-faced remove when he’s lectured, over and over again.
“I will not,” he says flatly, the first time Lan Qiren decrees him healed enough to walk to Cold Pond Cave. His uncle goes red and Wangji thinks, idly, that if they were not in a nominally public space, he would be shouting in earnest.
Instead, Lan Qiren barks, “You will respect the punishment for your transgressions.” It carries all the weight and pride of a man used to being obeyed as shifu of the sect, and Wangji considers with a distant kind of interest that he is very possibly crossing a final line.
“I will go into seclusion,” Wangji says. He is tired. He is always tired, now, tired and empty except when he is rampantly, blindingly angry with absolutely everyone except A-Yuan. His voice is cold and still and unaffected, the inflectionless Second Jade. “I will remain in seclusion for three years, or until the elders agree that my punishment is ended. But I will not leave A-Yuan alone.”
His uncle storms and glares and, yes, eventually shouts. Wangji bears it as stoically as he withstood the whip, and says nothing more on the subject.
The thing is, Wangji has crushed every rule of his sect underheel, all for the cause of a man reviled as a monster, and he is intimately aware of how furious Lan Qiren is. He can relate; Wangji is furious too, when he has the energy. Despite that, though—despite that, Wangji knows that his uncle never forgave his father for abandoning them. Xichen and Wangji grew up with their mother imprisoned by their father’s hand and their father imprisoned by his own, for the sake of his guilt, and Wangji may have done a great deal more to break the Lan rules than his father before him, but he will not leave A-Yuan without him for three years.
Lan Wangji will not be the latest in a line of parents to leave Wen Yuan alone.
Some time during Lan Qiren’s tirade—Wangji is not paying attention and doesn’t plan to—someone grows worried enough to get Xichen. Maybe they think Wangji’s disinterest indicates a fresh retreat into the fog, or maybe they think that their shifu is working himself up into a qi deviation, or maybe they would just like to be able to use the infirmary again but aren’t quite prepared to tell Lan Qiren of all people that shouting is forbidden in Cloud Recesses. Perhaps they’re hoping Xichen will do it. Regardless, Wangji repeats himself, word-perfect, and Lan Qiren goes over the high points of his shouting, in a slightly more moderate tone, and Xichen’s eyes go faintly tight around the corners, in the way that suggests that he’s developing a headache.
Wangji is objectively aware that he should be sorry to make his brother mediate, but he isn’t. As crimes go, it’s the least of his, lately.
Xichen negotiates, for a while, and Wangji watches in silence, only barely more attentive than he was when it was only Lan Qiren shouting at him. At least this way he and Xichen only get shouted at half as much, when Lan Qiren finally cracks again and begins to raise his voice.
Wangji blinks and focuses afresh on the conversation when he sees Xichen glance down at him. It’s an admission of distraction, of weakness, that Xichen is usually better than giving, but Wangji watches his brother watch him, watches Xichen’s mouth thin into that rare hard line that apparently makes them look very much alike, and then—
“Enough!” Xichen says, and it may be the closest Wangji has seen him come to shouting in…years. Xichen snaps out a hand in a harsh slicing motion, as if using a blade to cut the conversation short, and Lan Qiren falls silent in offended shock. Xichen takes a deep breath and draws himself up to his full height. When, Wangji wonders, did his brother grow taller than Lan Qiren?
“That is enough,” Xichen repeats, stiff, into the shocked silence. “Lan-shifu, I have heard your argument. I say that my brother is acting from a laudable desire to care for his son, and there is precedent in Gusu Lan for seclusion on sect grounds. He will carry out his seclusion in the gentian house, where our honored mother did the same.” Wangji sees the moment of hesitation, the moment where Lan Qiren might be able to refute him. Then Xichen glances briefly down at Wangji again, looks up, and says coolly, “It is righteous for a father to care for his son, even during a punishment for misbehavior.”
The knife slides in and Wangji knows, weary and sure, that he has won.
Three days later, Lan Wangji walks the distance from the infirmary to the gentian house, and forces himself to remain upright long enough to rest a hand on A-Yuan’s head and stroke his hair. The boy won’t live with him all the time, but for now—for now, he’s told that A-Yuan barely speaks to anyone else, cries when he’s left alone, steals food from the table and hides it. He is wild and afraid and clings to Wangji’s hands when he’s brought to the gentian house, and it tears open his back again but Wangji kneels down and lets A-Yuan throw himself into his arms. Xichen’s alarm is obvious, but Wangji silences him with a look and waits for A-Yuan to fall asleep before he allows the physician to look at his wounds.
They are worse again. A-Yuan’s weight, the tight grip of his little hands, have torn the lashes on Wangji’s shoulders open, and he is bleeding into his bandages, into his robes. The physician tells him to lie still for a few days, to send the boy to the creche where the aunties can take care of him. She tells him that he will worsen the scarring if he doesn’t do as he’s told. Wangji listens and nods and does not send A-Yuan away.
It takes seventeen days before Wangji can sit upright for more than an hour without feeling like he’s about to pass out—before he can sit behind his guqin and force his aching hands to pluck out the notes of Inquiry.
He decides it doesn’t matter. He makes himself walk anyway, makes himself care for A-Yuan, pulls him close when he wakes up crying and confused in the night. It doesn’t matter. Wangji finds that he can rarely sleep, and A-Yuan—helps, a little. He sleeps very still, and Wangji’s admittedly limited experience with children says that this is unusual, but it is fortunate. It means that Wangji can raise his arm as he did in the infirmary, and A-Yuan can tuck himself up against his side, and sleep there, warm and breathing and still, without disturbing Wangji’s bandages.
It isn’t every night, but Wangji wishes it was. He doesn’t sleep more, with A-Yuan beside him, but what sleep he can salvage is easier. It should be shameful, for a grown man to want the company of a child to beat back the dark, but Wangji finds that he can’t will himself into regretting it.
Wangji can hear his uncle’s voice, imagined, telling him that the boy will have to learn to sleep alone someday.
For once in his life, Lan Wangji ignores it. He turns his focus onto the strings under his hands, and watches his son sleep, and plays Inquiry until dawn.