One year passed, and Qiping remained at Clear Water Mountain.
Bixian wrung her hands as she paced about the lakeside pagoda. It was a pleasant space; the platform elevated slightly above the water, with cattails and water lilies cultivated nearby. She sometimes wished there was a similar place at the Qilin Sage’s temple, so she could stand upon the water without the need to expend magic.
Potential conversations began and ended in her head. Qiping was becoming more verbose by the day—she even insisted on calling Bixian “Mother”—but that only made her stubbornness more apparent. There was no way she could coerce Qiping to leave the place; she would have to convince the child to go willingly.
Yet just as she had found evidence of the darkness she had always known about this place, she could not bring herself to break the illusion of the Qiao for Qiping. How soft her heart had become, that it quavered more for the hypothetical tears of a child than the horrors that she had just witnessed.
Travelers sometimes came through Clear Water Mountain, and some would stay for a while if the weather was inclement, their labor paying for food and lodging. The town was small and unguarded, Prince Wenrong its so-called magistrate more comfortable with the pen and abacus than the sword and shield, so more than one guest had tried to test the boundaries of the Qiao’s hospitality.
They abruptly would be gone the following morning. Scared off by the Qiao’s resident demons perhaps, though Bixian had always suspected something more sinister was afoot.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she spied the snake woman exiting the outhouse with a bloody knife and a wooden box, when a few moments before one of the visiting laborers had entered. Even the latrine couldn’t mask the unmistakable odor of human flesh.
Once the coast was clear she hurriedly snuck a peek inside. In a corner, the man was dead, with strips of flesh carved from his arms and his trunk. His hands seemed to be clutching something in the corpse’s rigor mortis; it was hard to tell, as the man had no fingers. In the morning, the body was gone.
Mulling over the tableau she had witnessed, Bixian pulled out the reed flute from the folds of her sleeve. After one year of dedicated practice, Qiping had given up on the instrument and gave it back to her, as a sign that she wanted to leave the Qilin Sage’s temple. Bixian sighed and brought the flute to her lips, playing a small melody to calm herself.
“That was a bit flat.”
Lady Liuying, the same snake demon who carved the dead man’s flesh, approached from the bridge. A pipa was strapped to her back, and she held a small brazier on a stick. She approached the pagoda confidently, settling in on one of the stone chairs and setting the furnace down at her feet. Readying the pipa on her lap, she plucked a simple chord, humming alongside the notes in order to tune her instrument.
Bixian scoffed, trying to hide her nervousness. “This is an old instrument.”
“Do you need help tuning?” Without waiting for an answer, Lady Liuying played a simple scale. Bixian sighed and took a hairpin off her head, which she unsheathed to reveal a small carving knife. She carefully scored each finger hole to make sure they were perfectly round, then brought the flute back up to her lips to repeat the scale back at the snake. She kept the knife tucked inside her palm, just in case.
Lady Liuying smiled and struck up a light airy tune that matched the night’s atmosphere. Bixian nodded along for a bit, admiring how the melody stirred soft ripples on the water. After she had a good grasp of the song’s progression, she joined in with her flute. The two women played together for a while, an understanding evolving through music that ran deeper than their previous conversations. After one year, they were still relative strangers.
Lady Liuying did not seem to have much patience for children beside her own, so Bixian never had an excuse to interact with her on Qiping’s behalf.
As they concluded their duet, Bixian felt a pang of momentary sadness that it took an entire year for them to play music together. She could have spent the year composing songs with a kindred spirit instead of worrying in isolation. From the way Liuying handled her pipa, a gentleness bordering on reverence, it seemed that she felt the same way.
“An entire year of music lost,” she mused, and then laughed. Strands of long black hair fell from their neatly kept twists to rest on her shoulder. Lady Liuying brushed her hair back behind her ears with one hand, then followed their course down to the end, holding the tips of her hair like a brush.
“I should have sought out your friendship sooner.”
“Is that why you came here tonight?”
Lady Liuying shrugged and stood up, holding the handle of her brazier with one hand and the neck of her pipa in the other. “You seemed to be in need of company.”
“Your senses deceive you then. I was doing just fine.”
The snake demon lifted her chin. “If it weren’t for me, your notes would still be flat.”
“Perhaps I am at peace with flat notes.”
“That may be the only thing you are at peace with.”
Bixian glared at Lady Liuying, who smirked in response. The gall.
“You are very easy to read,” the snake demon laughed, setting the portable stove near Bixian’s feet and leaning against the side of the pagoda. “Now, my crane sister,” she said, lilting her voice to sound like Tangyou, “you must tell me what is troubling you.”
Bixian blinked and turned away. It would be unwise to divulge her feelings to a demon, no matter how skilled a musician she was. And besides that, it felt embarrassing to talk about fearing Heaven’s wrath to one of the supposed founders of the Qiao.
“Your daughter,” she began.
“There is nothing wrong with my daughter,” Liuying interjected coolly. Perhaps the matter of her daughter’s snakelike form was a sore subject for her.
“Forgive me,” Bixian said, “I misspoke. You…are you happy here among the Qiao?”
Liuying raised an eyebrow and laughed. “Why wouldn’t I be? We harvest enough to keep everyone fed, and what we cannot make ourselves we can buy from the town upstream. The children are growing big, and I have no fears of wind or rain.” She paused and took a breath. “I can make music and weave tapestries to my heart’s content. I have the love of a Tang prince. A daughter.”
“Don’t you fear repercussions?”
“From whom?”
“Heaven.”
“Every day,” Liuying sighed and fiddled with her pipa’s neck. “I fear waking up with everything we have built taken away. Little Ruoruo lost without a mother or father. But they have not found us yet.”
“The Qiao have only existed for less than a decade.”
“Perhaps I have spent too much time with mortals, because that seems like a very long time.” Lady Liuying walked back towards the stone chairs and took a seat, beckoning Bixian to join her. “Do you know how Wenrong and I met Tangyou and Luming?” She told the crane the story of carps and bridges, her hands dancing wildly as she recounted the battle that took place because of a misunderstanding. “I could have been smote right then, but instead I met two other kindred souls. And I believe it was not just chance that we met by the golden carp. If not the machinations of Heaven, then some even greater force brought us together.”
“That’s a nice thing to believe.” It was enticing to believe the story the snake wove, like one of her tapestries. Bixian closed her eyes and remembered the dead man in the outhouse, his flesh carved and his fingers missing.
“You saw him before I could dispose of him,” Liuying said sadly. Bixian turned, and the snake laughed. “As I said, you are very easy to read.”
“You make no secret of murder?”
“He was a thief. He was holding half of the town’s treasury in his hands, so tightly I had to sever most of his fingers. As the magistrate’s wife I was simply meting out justice as is his right in his own domain.”
“And the flesh? Was it necessary to take that as well?”
Lady Liuying looked down. “Our children get sick. For demons like us, human flesh is an invaluable medicine. I cannot be faulted in healing the sick.” She looked back up and held Bixian’s gaze, challenging her to respond.
“To Heaven you are still a dangerous demon. Even if you claim you’re looking after your own–”
“Then let them strike me down. They would do so anyways for a number of my transgressions.”
“And that doesn’t frighten you?”
“I do not care to waste my time contemplating futures that have yet to come.” The snake demon smiled. “But this is all such heavy talk for our level of inebriation. If you do not wish to retire yet, would you be interested in a game of go? I have played against everyone else so many times, a new opponent would be refreshing. I have a table in my parlor, and I’m sure I could bring in some wine while we play.”
Though she knew she should refuse the offer and keep searching for the right words to say to Qiping to get her to leave this place, Bixian did exactly the opposite and followed Lady Liuying across the stone bridge towards her quarters. It had been a long time since she played a good game of go.
It's only fitting two characters based on classic East Asian Romances (the Crane Wife and the White Snake) should be friends! Although in the process of writing this entire story, the question of what makes a "demon" (translated from 妖精/yaojing) versus a "god" (仙/神). I don't necessarily have an answer, but maybe that's one of the questions central to this story.