Yildun led the children north. It was as if her body wished to return home.

Even with winter on the horizon, she traded the silk lining of her jacket for a decrepit mule and led it along the road with Qiping on its back. Of what she had scrambled to take when the village fell, she still had her bow and a handful of arrows. Both children were exhausted, so she did her best to keep them awake and moving, asking them to gather mushrooms and kindling in the forest while she hunted.

It was cold; they were starving. Still she kept moving forward, ancestral memories telling her that when a village fell, violence rippled outwards for days. It was not safe on Clear Water Mountain; she doubted she would feel safe ever again.

Once he had recovered after a good night’s sleep, Xingbei was at her side constantly, a ready pair of helping hands. He did not speak about what transpired in the archives that night.

“Your father loved you,” Yildun had whispered to him the first night, holding him tight as if he were still a child who needed a parent’s warmth to get through the night.

Xingbei’s shoulders were set, his demeanor calm, when he replied, “I know, Niang.”

Qiping moved around in a daze. Yildun had seen the girl’s moods before, when she first came to Clear Water Mountain and when her traitorous mother disappeared. She had indulged the girl’s bouts of silence before because she was her daughter’s friend, though in her darker moments Yildun would wonder whether the girl was so soft because of the Qiao’s tolerance. In her old household, someone who rarely spoke was still given tasks to do to keep the clan fed.

She indulged Qiping now because it was the least she could do to honor the Qiao’s memory, to be kind.

Though she had to be asked thrice or more, eventually Qiping would come out of her stupor and help with whichever task Yildun had set her, be it washing rice or gathering firewood. Yildun contemplated giving the girl a knife, but with such unpredictability she thought better of it.

They settled in a village upriver, in a shack priced almost to extortion. Yildun counted the meager earnings from each day’s hunt and knew they could not live there long. If only she had time to truly prepare for the road; to have a warm tent and fur-lined bedrolls, and a horse that didn’t threaten to bite off fingers every time someone approached. If only it had been a choice to leave, instead of a necessity.

If only she had said goodbye to her home, instead of losing it in a single night.

-

Mercy came in the form of Chen Di, who had somehow tracked them from the village at the mountain base. He took one look at their living space and purchased a plot of land for them, and paid the shack’s rent until a house could be built.

“It’s barely enough land to feed three people,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

Yildun studied the man, with whom she may have had two full conversations before today. She had always thought he looked strange among the spirits and demons of the Qiao, with no bonds to speak of except his doglike devotion to his Tang prince.

“You did not have to do anything at all,” she said.

Chen Di smiled at her sadly. “It’s the last thing I can do, to honor the Qiao.” He looked over at Xingbei and Qiping, who were beginning to pack their meager belongings to move into the new house. Or at least, Xingbei packed and Qiping watched, knees pulled up to her chest and eyes staring forward without blinking. “Just as you honor them by raising the children.”

“Xingbei is my flesh and blood,” Yildun countered.

“And the girl?”

Yildun did not answer. She knew she could have abandoned Qiping during the fire; she practically dragged the girl down Clear Water Mountain. All she had to do was let go of Qiping’s hand and she would have been someone else’s problem.

The girl was around Xingbei’s age when she arrived at Clear Water Mountain. Ever since, she had been attached to her daughter’s side. If asked, Qiping could probably sing songs of Yildun’s youth better than her own children.

“She is my daughter’s friend,” was Yildun’s final reply.

Chen Di nodded in understanding.

Yildun looked at the man, how tired he looked, and saw in his eyes her own reflection. She had long bid farewell to her youth, but at last the years were catching up to her. She had aged a thousand years in a single night. They all did; she was thrust into old age as Xingbei was thrust into adulthood.

“Any news of my daughter?”

“The last she was seen, she had flown off carrying the sword containing the souls of Lady Tangyou and Lord Luming. Jin Silang said that he and five other demons had given her their cultivated powers before they left.”

“Their powers?”

“So that they may revoke their demon pelts and live with their children as mortals.”

Yildun yelled in anger and slammed her hand against the nearest wall. “Was this offer given before or after my husband passed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did my daughter ask to take revenge, or was she just given the sword and told to kill?”

“I don’t know, madame, I don’t know.”

“Tell me,” she said bitterly, “did you ever lose two loved ones in a single night? Three, counting my son who will never fly again.” Chen Di kept his eyes on Yildun and his face impassive as he said, “Yes, madame, I do. My family fell out of favor with the Emperor in my youth. Half of my clan were made to drink poison. The prince's mother, Consort Si, raised me as she did her son. To that I am forever grateful." Chen Di laughed ruefully. "Perhaps it's because of her that the prince and I share similar leanings. Like him, I cannot help loving wild and beautiful things."

When Yildun did not respond, he reached into his satchel and produced a jade pendant of a turtle. “This is Prince Wenrong’s seal,” he continued. “Should you ever need help, seek him out in the capital. Or you may sell it in hard times. Take care, Luo-furen.”

Chen Di turned to leave and almost collided with Luo Xingbei, who had a pail of water in his hands.

The boy had heard it all, he realized sadly, but there was no way to go but forward.

“I don’t need to tell you to take care of your mother,” Chen Di said to the boy, “but also remember to take care of yourself.” “I will,” Xingbei said. It may be because he had never had much to do with the Luo family, but Chen Di noted with surprise that the boy was almost as tall as he was.

-

That winter, Xingbei prepared the fields for planting in the spring.

He woke up before winter’s late dawn and set to work wrapped in layers of blankets, which he would shed as the day went on and his body warmed up from the labor. They had farms in the Qiao Village, and Xingbei had spent his fair share of time watching the adults till the earth with pick and plow. He and the other children were often tasked with weeding in the summer and harvesting fruits in the autumn. Many hands made light work of these tasks.

Alone, he was keenly aware of what he didn’t know. He knew the motions required for each tool, but they were all heavier than they looked, and his first tries were clumsy and inaccurate. Still he practiced again and again, swinging a hoe into the same hole in the ground until his arms burned and his shoulders ached.

His father’s dying words echoed in Xingbei’s head. He would take care of his mother.

When winter came and there was nothing to be down to the frozen ground, Xingbei went into town and exchanged chores for farm wisdom. He sat down with old uncles who were wizened as walnuts and asked which seeds should be planted and when. He drank sour sorghum wine with burly men twice his size to learn how to maintain each piece of equipment; he massaged aunties’ feet to learn which merchants were the most generous with their prices.

The first day of spring, when the ground had barely thawed, Xingbei went to work with the discipline of a field marshal. In the beginning he didn’t finish what he had set out to do until it was dark; even the threat of wolves did not deter him. When the work was finally done he would go inside and collapse on the bedroll Qiping had laid out for him.

His mother deferred to his ideas, and set to supplement their income with birds she hunted in the nearby forest. In the beginning, Yildun took their crops to town to sell, the names of the good merchants memorized, but soon Xingbei was accompanying her there as well.

“You have your father’s features,” she explained to him, “and you speak with an accent more pleasing to their ears. They like your cute face.”

For the first time, Xingbei smiled, a child again as Yildun pinched his cheeks. It felt so foreign to him now. As his mother smiled, however, she became less of the tired stranger he lived with and more the mother he knew.

Qiping did not smile. She barely spoke, and unless directed she barely moved. With Xingbei in the fields and Yildun in the forest, Qiping took care of the house. There was dust in the corners and oil staining the bowls, but a bedroll was set out for Xingbei each night to fall into blissful, dreamless sleep.

Xingbei could tell she ached with pain beyond his understanding, but he was not his sister. There was no joke he could tell, no funny gesture he could pull to bring Qiping out of her mind. So he waited, and worked, because the work was unending. The desire to survive and to see Qiping smile again kept it from becoming toil.

One day at the start of summer, Xingbei finished weeding the final row of crops and looked up at the sky. It was unceasingly blue, with scattered clouds stretched thin by the wind like candy floss. A cool breeze stirred, the millet stalks rustling, and Xingbei rested contently against his rake.

The day’s work was finished, he realized, and it was barely past noon.

Unsure of what to do with himself, Xingbei washed up and headed to town.

The plot of land Chen Di had bought for him was yielding a fair amount of crops, and Xingbei could be hopeful and look at what to buy with earnings from the harvest. An ox, perhaps, to help with tilling the fields, though an animal came with its own costs.

As he walked among the merchants and hawkers in the town square, one voice caught his ear above the din.

“Instruments, get your instruments here! Pipas, suonas, flutes, all sorts to delight your ears. Even a novice can bang a drum!”

That night, Xingbei presented Qiping with a new pipa. His mother looked at him curiously, but if she felt any displeasure at his frivolity, she kept it to herself.

“You used to practice pipa with Auntie Liuying, right? I miss hearing you play.”

Qiping looked at the instrument as if it were a very large stone.

“You used to play a lot. You got really good.” Xingbei tentatively plucked a strong on the pipa. It sang a weak, flat note; the instrument needed to be tuned, but he didn’t know what the right notes sounded like. “Your brow would furrow with concentration. Different from how it’s furrowed now.”

As he spoke he watched her carefully, hoping for some change to come across her face. It remained implacable as stone; the face of a stranger he once knew.

“I know I can’t ask you to smile,” he said, “but I wish you would. I miss it. I miss your smile.”

Xingbei missed a lot of things, but he did not let himself pause to feel it. Keep moving, as his mother did. Keep moving or despair. His father trusted him to care for his mother. And though he is not as strong, or brave, or cunning as Xingxi, he had to bear the duty because there was no one left. No more eager hands of parents, uncles and aunties, friends and sister to lift him up or catch him. A world of familiar faces turned into a world of strangers in a single night. His childhood burned in the archives that night.

-

This was the first time Xingbei had lived close to mortals, and so he experienced mortal customs for the first time. Though they made zongzi on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, the Qiao never had any dragon boats. Instead, Ao Luming would transform into a dragon and let the children ride on his back, carrying them downstream and through rapids that would leave the screaming, laughing children soaked and shaking in the warm late spring.

The wooden dragon boats the mortal children raced were pale imitations. Once painted garish colors, now faded after many years, the boats rocked along the waves as children climbed the masts and filled the bow with laughter. Children barely younger than he was. He should be laughing there with them, Xingbei thought. Even if his mother forced him to take a day off from working in the fields, he could no longer abandon himself in the carefree play of children. Even the skewer of candied haws he bought from the vendor tasted less sweet.

Both Qiping and his mother hated crowds and watched the festival from afar. Xingbei wondered if his indifference to the throng of village life was something he got from his father, or his upbringing with the Qiao.

Even if they were tart and stuck to his teeth, the candied haws were delicious, and Xingbei made a note to himself to buy more skewers for him and his family to enjoy. Even if it meant he had to have half portions for the next week, he wanted to give his mother sweetness to enjoy. He was making his way through the crowds, eye trained on the candied haw hawker’s sign, when he caught sight of her in the distance.

Bixian’s gray robes and the glint of her golden knife were forever burned into his memory. Even if what he saw was only another woman with a knife at her hip, Xingbei started and turned around, hoping to disappear into the crowd. He hunched his shoulders and was glad for once that he had not grown much in the past year; he disappeared beneath the shoulders of adults much bigger than him, scrambling between legs like a street urchin.

He eventually ducked into an alleyway, his hair undone from its topknot and a bruise forming at his cheek when a man elbowed him, thinking he was a cutpurse. Holding his tie in his teeth, Xingbei quickly put up his hair again and glanced around for any signs of grey or gold.

A hand tapped his shoulder and he spun around, already certain who stood behind him. Without a second thought, he lowered his head and rammed into Bixian, who gave a quick exhale as the wind was knocked out of her, before reaching out her hand to hold Xingbei by the head.

Perhaps he was tired of fear, because all Xingbei felt at the moment was rage. “What else do you have to take from me?” he spat at the crane. “If you’re here to kill me, I’m going to make it the messiest killing you’ve ever done.”

“Calm down, little eagle,” she said after she gathered her breath. “I’m not here to hurt you.” She stepped back as Xingbei began to swing his arms out at her, too short to reach her body.

“Traitor,” Xingbei spat. “Murderer.”

“Is Qiping well?” Bixian let go of Xingbei as he tried to bite her hand and sidestepped his attempt to tackle her.

Xingbei landed on his hands and knees. He spat on the ground and did not turn to face Bixian. “As if I’ll tell you.”

“So she’s with you.”

“Give me my father back.”

“I don’t want to fight, Luo Xingbei,” she said sternly, and for a second Xingbei flinched, remembering that same voice instructing him on how to properly transform into an eagle. The eagle form she had taken away from him.

“What do you want then?”

“I have something for Qiping–”

“She doesn’t want it.”

“Not even immortality?”

Xingbei turned his head back and stared at the crane, who had produced a small gourd-shaped vial in her hands.

“You offer her immortality to my face?” he laughed. “Why couldn’t you have spared my father instead?”

“He was already mortally wounded when he flew into the archives. The last thing he did was save your sister.” Bixian hid the vial back into the sleeves of her robes and held out a string of silver taels instead. “For taking care of Qiping.”

Xingbei stared. He didn’t want to take the crane’s blood money, but he was in no position to say no to money. He wished Bixian had produced something easy he could refuse; a pearl the size of a duck egg, perhaps, or an intricately carved jade cicada. Something he could throw down and stomp into the dirt, stomp into worthlessness. Not something that would give them extra meal and safety for months.

“I still hate you,” he muttered as he pocketed the taels. “Qiping does too.”

“Please ask her,” Bixian said, before disappearing in swirls of grey ribbon that evaporated into smoke.

Xingbei bought three haw skewers and a basket of zongzi, piping hot in their banana leaves. “Old Man Yi owed me extra from last week’s crop,” he said when Yildun asked him where he had money for the extra food.

They ate at the edge of the river, watching as the sunset gave way to glowing lanterns that turned the river’s water gold. At Yildun’s urging, Xingbei joined the crowd atop one of the dragon boats, pale simulacrum of the real thing as it were, and for a moment amidst the laughter he thought he heard himself laughing too.

The river glowed, the lanterns’ reflections like stars come down from heaven. Xingbei thought he caught sight of some fish swimming alongside the boats, seemingly unafraid. Perhaps they could differentiate between these festival boats and the boats of fishermen. There was a splash, and he thought he caught sight of golden scales as one fish leapt out of the water for a brief second, perhaps to catch one of the zongzi folks threw into the water.

His sister used to recite the story every year, jumping onto one of the stone benches of the lakeside pavilion and performing with the zeal of a street performer. The poet Qu Yuan, drowned to prove his loyalty to his king.

If only such loyalty existed now.

The sight of the dragon boats made him miss Uncle Luming. The mild-mannered dragon prince was not the funnest adult, but he gave great words of comfort to a scraped knee or a lost toy. He believed in the potential of even the smallest beings, be it a humble Tudigong or a mangy half-demon child.

Xingxi was the one who took after their father; Xingbei had accepted it long ago. He had thought he would be like their mother, but if he had to choose a demon to grow into, Uncle Luming would not have been a bad choice.

He tossed a zongzi into the river in his dragon uncle’s name.

-

Summer came and went. The work Xingbei put into the crops yielded melons bigger than his head and millet that he could not see over. He had to bring a stepstool to the fields to thresh the millet, and so he only heard the squawks from the chicken coop and could not see what was causing the commotion.

There was talk of a wolf stalking the edge of town. Heart pounding, Xingbei clutched his thresher as he ran towards the chicken coop. A part of him hoped it was a wolf; if he could kill it, its pelt would fetch a fine price. As he rounded the corner, there was no wolf; instead there was a person in faded brown clothes desperately wrangling the chickens.

“Quiet you stupid birds! I’m supposed to be here in secret, in secret!”

Xingbei froze. He recognized that voice, even if it sounded different than what it did in his memory. Moreover, he recognized the accent, the same one he and his mother spoke with. This was a voice he heard probably more than his own, telling stories when their parents were asleep.

He called out her name. “Xingxi!” He was afraid the wind had taken her name from his lips.

The person turned and there was his sister, looking a year older, face hardened, arms toned with muscle. There was his father, too, because Xingxi took after him just as Xingbei took after Yildun.

Luo Xingxi smiled with a chicken under her arm. “Xingbei. You’ve grown.”

The chicken was dropped and the siblings hugged each other tightly. Xingbei, so used to looking up at his sister, realized with a start that he was only half a head shorter than her.

“Where have you been?” Xingbei asked, his face buried in his sister’s shoulder. “I thought you were dead.”

“I’m training with Uncle Luming’s father–the dragon of four swords. Once I can land a hit on him, he’ll give me the sword back and I can avenge them.” She broke the hug to look Xingbei in the eye. “I can avenge Baba.”

Xingbei shook his head. “You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

“Come in with me. Ma’s out but Qiping–”

“I don’t want to see Qiping.”

“Why not.”

Xingxi looked down. “You saw what her mother did. How can I forgive her?”

Xingbei kicked her shin. “What are you, six? You haven’t seen her in a year. She misses you. You miss her.”

“You don’t know anything, Xingbei. You’re just a child.”

“Not anymore.”

“No,” Xingxi sadly agreed. “Not anymore.”

“So are you coming in?”

Xingxi shook her head. “I need to get back to training. I’ve already been gone too long.”

“Why come by if you’re only here for a second?”

“I wanted to see that you were alright.”

“I’m doing my best.”

Xingxi gathered her brother back into a hug. “You’ve grown up so much so quickly. I’m sorry little brother.”

“What do I tell them?” Xingbei asked. “Do I just pretend you weren’t here?”

“Tell them you had a dream. That you just know that your big sister is okay.”

Xingbei stepped back and watched with mixed wonder and envy as Xingxi did a front flip and transformed into an eagle and flew away in the bright endless sky.

“Do you miss my sister?” Xingbei asked Qiping that night.

Qiping stared at him and shrugged.

“I know I can’t replace her. I’m not as strong or as smart as she is. But I’m doing my best.”

Xingbei rocked back on his haunches and traced patterns into the ground.

“I saw your mother during the dragon boat festival,” he continued, and flinched as Qiping’s head swiveled to stare at him. “She wanted to talk to you but…I said no. But I never asked you, would you forgive her? She seems to have grand plans for you”

“If I had to choose,” Qiping said slowly, “I would want to see your sister more.” The sound of her voice startled Xingbei so much he lost his balance and landed onto his back.

“She misses you too,” Xingbei blurted out, once more the tagalong little brother, the mediator between two close friends.

Qiping shrugged. A couple nights later, she took up the pipa and began to play.

this may be one of my favorite chapters.