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Somewhere outside, the sun still shines. It had been shining an hour ago, catching on the curve of her husband’s ear where it poked pink and vulnerable through the shroud of his hair. Rong Xuan had been asleep, not dead; she kept her hand on the rise and fall of his back to remind herself.
There is no sun here. The shelves shoved in front of the window take care of that, piled two-deep as if that will stop the thing outside from coming through it if it really wants to. It had tried once already, and only laughed when it found it blocked. Now, there’s only the whistle of her own breath, the harsh scents of her medicines, and underneath, the faint remains of blood. She hadn’t scrubbed the floor yet, only thrown water over it.
Long Que will be back tomorrow. She can only imagine him stumbling unawares into this.
The knock on the door, when it comes, is slow and deliberate: rap…rap…rap, each pause a listening pause. It tried the door once, too, but that has a bar.
“Furen?”
The voice is her husband’s voice, but the knocks are not: she has never known him to knock with anything other than a flurry of sharp taps, or a kick to the bottom of a door—never anything so polite. So patient.
Her hand had been on him, charting the tidal swell of his breaths, when he had turned and opened her husband’s eyes and looked at her with a wholly foreign venom.
She stands, forcing herself forward until her hands meet the wood of the door. She braces them there. “What are you?” she says.
There’s another pause, and then a weight falls heavily against the door. She fears an assault on the door, but it just leans there, almost intimate through three finger-widths of wood. “Your esteemed husband,” it croons. “Why does my wife run from me?”
“He calls me by my name,” she says, and says no more. She has already sacrificed so much for the hope of him calling her name again; to put it in this creature’s hands would be to hand it a knife.
“Does he,” the voice responds, almost thoughtful. They lean there, two sides balanced, the silence thickening until she thinks she must be drowning in it. She presses her cheek to the door, wanting to crack it open and catch just a glimpse of his face; fearing it equally.
When it leaves, it goes without another word, as if losing interest. She knows better than to think the door will be unwatched, but at least she’s locked in with her best weapons.
She turns back to the tincture on the stove, fanning the steam until it parts and she can see the seething surface. The color looks right, at last; she pulls it from the heat and takes out the needles she keeps in her sleeve. One by one, she anoints them.
The next time, it doesn’t knock. It announces itself with a hard slam that rattles the door in its frame. She could never be a match for her husband in pure strength, so she doesn’t try to hold the door. Still, as she stands ready to move, every impact against the door makes her flinch. She can feel it in her teeth, in her bones, the hardest parts of her ringing in sympathy with the juddering wood.
The frame starts to give way first, splintering around the metal loop that secures the bar. She watches as the metal jumps with each hit, dancing free of its mooring one step at a time. When the wood finally loses its grip, the door flies open, the bar springing free to tumble and land clattering at her feet.
With light spilling around him from outside, he’s only a familiar shadow, long graceful lines and the careless spill of his hair around his shoulders. She loves him. The tenderness of it stops her throat. And then he bends down and picks something up from the ground beside him, hefting it with all the elegance of a blunt club. She nearly fails to recognize it; Rong Xuan's sword is not quite as famous as his father's other creations, but it had been quicksilver in his hand.
She moves first. The needles streak between them, striking one-two-three and standing, quivering, in the meat of his chest. It should be enough sedative to drop a man twice his size in an instant.
He steps through the doorway.
Terror grips her by the back of the neck. He—no, it—is not stopping. Another step, and then it raises the sword. She moves just as it sweeps down where she stood, singing through empty air. The thing—this thing that is not Rong Xuan, that perhaps is not even human—spins, standing between her and the door. If she makes a run for it—
It moves almost before she decides where she’s going, and she flings herself sideways, catching herself against the stove. Rong Xuan’s sword is sharp. It would take very little to plunge it into her stomach, and she can almost feel it, parting skin and organs around unyielding metal. She grabs the first thing to hand—the still-warm pot of sedative—and flings it at the monster. It clatters harmlessly to the floor, drenching its boots, and it smiles.
It looks just like Rong Xuan’s cocky come-at-me smile, the one he brings out when he’s winning a spar. “Is that all you can do?” it says. “Where’s that knife of yours? I’d like to see you try to carve out my heart again.”
She backs away, its words barely registering. The shelves. She moved them before, she can do it again. She wedges herself behind the first set, her eyes on the predatory smile advancing on her. The first push does little.
“Oh,” the thing wearing Rong Xuan’s face says. She can just see it through the gap between shelves. It has drifted sideways, attention on the basin filled with the rust-stained cloths and other detritus of the operation that resurrected her husband. It rifles through it, then comes up with a thin, sharp knife. “Here it is. Did it feel good? Cracking my ribs open? Sticking this in me?”
The second and third push build momentum, the shelf leaning into a dangerous pendulum sway. When she throws her weight into it as it rocks forward, it finally overbalances, crashing face-down between them.
“I could feel it,” the thing is saying, flipping the knife so that the edge catches the light. “Inside me. Cold as ice against parts of me that I didn’t know had feeling.”
She pulls at the second self in desperation, burrowing behind it before there’s room for her, the fit so tight she can barely breathe. If she can only get to the window behind it, she can get out.
She gasps as that space gets suddenly tighter. Hot breath floods over her face as the thing that isn’t Rong Xuan presses its face between the heavy wooden slats that are all that separate them. It’s leaning his full weight into the shelf. Her ribs groan—she’s being crushed—she’ll die suffocating within reach of fresh air. “Do you know who I am now?” it says.
Carve out my heart. She closes her eyes. Blood spilling hot as fire over her hands, the frenzied animal weight of a still-beating heart in her palms, like a fish struggling for air. She had pressed it into the gaping maw of Rong Xuan’s chest, felt it reattach where his dead heart had been, flesh reaching for flesh. The stranger whose heart she had stolen was still gasping, somehow alive, behind her.
When that breath hitched and then stopped, Rong Xuan’s lips parted on a sigh.
“I know who you are,” she rasps, with the little breath she can find. It’s his blood on the floor of this room. His heart inside her husband’s chest. His anger animating her husband’s body. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
He laughs, long and rowdy and horrible, rocking the shelf into her with his hysterics. “I am,” he says. “I am dead, but I can hold onto him if I want to. He’s so weak, furen. I can hold onto him as long as it takes to kill you.”
She claws her way along the wall. Sets her foot on the second shelf. Pushes, writhes, stops breathing entirely, her lungs screaming for air. His laugh goes on and on. He doesn’t seem to understand how hard she’s willing to fight. He laughs until her hand closes on the edge of the window, and then she gets a good enough grip to pull herself halfway through it, gasping and coughing as she sucks in air. The vise of shelf and wall tightens over her legs as he screams his fury and tries to hold her there with his weight.
“Is this how you want your revenge?” she says. “Catching me like a fox in a trap?”
“I don’t need a trap,” he replies. “I have a hostage.” The grip on her legs eases so abruptly she nearly falls through the window again before she manages to pull herself through. He calls after her, “Don’t you want your husband to live? I’ll never let him go, never, not until you’ve paid in blood for my life!”
She doesn’t get very far. She collapses in the overgrown garden, butterflies flitting by overhead, and lets her tears soak into the earth. Consciousness flees—sleep, or something less wholesome—and when she opens her eyes again, the night is deep blue, still and hot. She sits up, aching, and starts when a shape she had taken for a rock shifts. Then she recognizes the outline. “Have you been sitting here waiting for me?” she says.
For a moment, she can pretend. He will laugh lightly, and offer her some sweet he’s been saving, or come to run his hand through her hair and kiss her. Let her pull him down into the grass with her. She will lay her head on his chest and listen to the thunder of his heartbeat.
Rong Xuan’s laugh is the brightest sound she’s ever known. Though she has been surrounded all her life by people dedicated to learning and healing, she is nevertheless constantly astounded by the depth of his big heart, by his leaps of intellect, by his infectious relish for life. There is no one in the world like him, and so when the shape turns to her, she knows by the posture alone that it’s still the stranger.
She also knows exactly what she will do to keep Rong Xuan’s light in the world.
Yue Feng’er rises to her knees, and then to her feet. Her legs are a solid ache, but they’re steady enough to hold her as she crosses the grass between them. The stranger looks at her, moonlight silvering the line of his nose, the dip in his upper lip. He reaches for the hilt of the sword resting beside him. When he raises it, she guides the point to the center of her chest herself, her fingers feather-light against the blade. They’re shaking, she notes distantly. That won’t be a problem for long.
She’s already traded one life for Rong Xuan’s. Compared to the first, this will be clean and easy.
“You’ll let him go?” she says.
“You’re the only one keeping me here,” he says.
Her hands fall to her sides, and she keeps her eyes on Rong Xuan’s, drinking in the sight for the last time. Her lips are threatening to twist, but she forces the words through them. “Then do it.”
Rong Xuan is standing. For a moment, he’s sure that he only blacked out for a moment. His hand is touching cloth soaked with warm liquid; it must be his blood. But that’s not right. There’s another body. His hand is pressed to its back, while it rests against his chest.
It’s not breathing, this body. It’s dead weight in his arms; he has to tighten his grip to stop it slithering to the ground. Darkness presses on his eyelids. That sunlit afternoon must be long gone, and he is afraid to know what he’s woken up to. He recognizes the heft of a sword in his other hand—much of the body’s weight is held on that sword, which must be plunged through its center mass.
His breath is speeding up. He knows already. Under blood and green things growing, he can smell the sharper edge of the floral scent his wife wears. He peels his eyes open and makes himself look at the person he has stabbed.
When the first martial artists arrive the next morning, he is still screaming.