“Please,” Yuhui pressed again, voice depleted in the peak of his petitioning, “This would mean the world to me, Laike.”

Laike bowed his head, jaw tight. He didn’t turn into Yuhui’s insistent touch. Instead, he implored him gently:

“You should get dressed, my prince.”

And so, Yuhui, youngest prince of the Tian clan, middle heir in a class system he perpetually struggled against, decided that he was not good enough to return a favor; he was not skilled enough to dress a wound caused by his own lack of harmony. He was merely a pretty treasure meant for a cushioned seat, a display case boy who got everything he wanted without having to exert any energy to give back what he’d taken. He was a clumsy child, spoiled and worth only the weight of his name, full of unskilled words and weak arguments and wants negated by his lineage.

He was told what to do by someone who had no right telling him to do anything at all, yet the royal boy still obeyed. Who was he to argue? Who was he to say what was good for himself, or to express a desire for even the smallest measure of reciprocation? How could he be worth so much and so little at the exact same time?

Hurt by how apparent his own inadequacy felt, the older boy dipped his head and untied his belt. He stood and adjusted his robe in full, redressed himself, let his fingers retie the elaborate knot around his waist that kept the waves of deep sea silk he adored so much snug against his body.

“Is there something I can give you, then?” Yu asked once more, a final plea. “Is there something that you need that I could give you to show you how much this passing peace of mind means to me?”

“You can tell the lady of the mountain you were pleased with me,” Yunji’s deadly disciple replied, eyes still on the floor, tracing the lines of the royal boy’s cast shadow on the bloodstained floor where his own shadow was absent. How he desperately wanted to raise his eyes to study Yuhui directly, to watch him move across the backlit paper screens, to accept his offer of aid, to write another lyric upon the palm of his hand—

but it was not his place to want;

the mountain taught him

far too well

“If I’m honest… it’s boring on Yunji,” he admitted, looking down at the overzealous wound Yuhui’s chaotic aura had carved into his hand, watched it continue to bleed despite pressure. “I’d like to come to Fanxing city more often. They don’t let us have meat or sweets up there—” Finally, that shy thing tilted his chin up and to the side, like he was daring himself to look directly into the prince’s bedlam glow once more. “—but Swordmaster Xueyu said he’d buy me whatever I want to eat while we’re here.”

“Okay.” Yuhui nodded, tracing the shape of that shadowgift boy once more. His eyes fell down the obsidian shimmer of his sun touched hair, following the curve of his back and legs, lingering briefly on the floor collecting the excessive spill of ink it happily drank up then the space where Laike’s shadow should be.

“I’ll tell her,” the Tian son said as he turned to his door. “I’m sure you’re looking forward to getting to the market, so I’ll stop delaying you.”

“Wait,” Laike interrupted as he turned, like he intended to rise and follow but faltered in his pursuit of the strange royal youth. “… it’s… worse than I thought it was.”

Yuhui glanced back, then continued toward the door. “Okay. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He was true to his word, leaving the sliding panel open in his momentary absence, chatter of voices softly echoing from a sitting room down the long corridor that dead ended in the boy’s room. When he returned, he used a bare foot to pull the panels shut again, arms cradling a shallow basin of water and a small clutch of towels draped loose around his right wrist.

The royal child knelt next to Laike, laid the towels out. He retrieved a bundle of gauze squirreled away in the swathe of cloth wrapped around his abdomen.

“Rinse your hand.”

When Yuhui returned, Laike’s face brightened. He hid his smile behind solemn eyes as he observed the care with which the older boy had gathered supplies, tilted his head curiously as Yuhui set his first-aid station up. Without word or complaint, that pretty boy so often left secluded did just as he was told: he rinsed his wound in the basin soon clouded with blood.

More often than not, Laike watched the other boy’s edges at arms length—he couldn’t see them but he felt a thousand ghosts circling in monsoon patterns around his caretaker’s shape, snarling because they couldn’t close the gap.

“They’re angry,” that dark-tidings boy commented as he flicked his fingers in the water, hazel eyes caught in a glimpse above the prince’s head. “I think they miss you.”

“Tell them if they treated me better then I’d miss them too.” The absence of humor in Yu’s voice was contradicted by the grin that broke across his placid lips. He reached forward to pick Laike’s hand out of the rust colored water. The limb was carefully enveloped in a loosely woven towel—Yuhui’s touch was light even when he pressed the cloth to absorb the water left on the other boy’s skin.

“Which are you most excited to have: sweets or meats?” The Prince placed the spent towel to the side and began to wrap the dressing around Laike’s hand.

“Probably meat.” Laike glanced up to watch Yuhui’s face while he was distracted by his task. He was fascinated by how bright the Prince’s black eyes could be when he got his way, how hollow they’d appeared when he earlier declined help. “I’m going to bring candies back for the little kids back on Yunji. They probably still remember what it tastes like. That makes you miss it more, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” Yuhui nodded. “Knowing exactly what you miss makes it hard on the heart and mind.”

The persistent wrapping around the wellspring carved into the other boy’s hand was blotched through its thinner layers, spotty red covered and covered until thin was thicker and the white of the dressing remained more pristine, blood too slow for density. The Prince looked up after he carefully constructed a looped closure from the bandage’s end, woven through the topmost layers opposite the wound, hoping to catch Laike’s eyes.

“I hope you can come to Fanxing City more too, so those children won’t have to be without for too long. What is your favorite meat thing?”

Black eyes caught hazel and Laike was held fast, caught in the Prince’s null-and-void gaze. He was the rabbit, the prince was the snare; he was the fox and the prince was the bloodhound, the arrow, the blood in the air. His lips parted like he had words, like he was capable of word, but Laike couldn’t sort himself through well enough to provide a response. How was this happening? Why was Yuhui affecting him like this? Laike was often over-reserved, but he was capable of holding a conversation; shy, but friendly; deadly, but just.

“I… I’m sorry,” the boy of the shadows stammered before he sat a little straighter, looking forcefully down at his hands. “I don’t know why but I’m lost for words. I think your ghosts are taunting me.”

“I’m sorry. You can come closer,” Yuhui replied. “If the clarity you brought to my immediate space would help you think better.” The black eyed boy looked down to Laike’s hand caught between his own, idle grasp cradling the bandaged disciple’s limb in the tenderness of his touch atop the pillow of silks swirled around his neatly folded knees, midnight color barely lit by a silver coin moon.

The prince’s hold turned slack as he tilted his head, considering now as well as later. “Would you correspond with me? I mean, if you aren’t going to be the one performing my wardings now.”

“If someone writes me a letter, I always write back.” The younger boy was earnest in his statement even though no one had ever written him a letter before. He leaned in because where else would he go? His hand was forfeit in the prince’s lap, but it wasn’t the chaos stream that left him an idiot to Yuhui’s poetry. “I—”

“—will indeed be performing the warding next week,” Jiling interrupted from the doorway she’d slid silently open, a grim smile on her lips as she observed the two boys. Her swarm sense was already assessing the damage in her disciple’s hand, analysing the changes in Yuhui’s atmosphere. “Young Master Yuhui; Laike of the Shadowed Path. Fast friends, I see.” She glanced down towards their hands, head tilted in an unstated query.

Yuhui looked aside and easily let Laike have his hand back. He rose and stood before the lady of the mountain, extending his palms so she could see the masterful strokes wrought by her pupil’s adept hand, red thick and dried in all the shallow lines of the royal boy’s skin. His steps left Laike in the ritual mess scattered around his table—tea and sigil poetry, blood bath and ink brush, the fury of the unseen compressed outside of that older boy’s slowly shrinking pocket of clarity, seething deep in the throat of reality.

“He figured it out very quickly,” the middle heir of the Tian clan boasted of his treatment. “He’s given me such peace, Lady Jiling. I’m so pleased and grateful and… apologetic that his hand was injured so badly.”

“Physical discomfort is transient; pain is body and the body is hollow,” she said warm, doting—she’d been warding this boy since she was seventeen, keeping the chaos from consuming him since he was small. She looked at Yuhui in much the same way as every orphan she cared for on the mountain: abandoned by circumstance to be raised in the shadow of the swarm. “Laike understands this.”

Laike nodded, deferential. “Pain is body and the body is hollow,” he repeated as he rose to meet the tiny woman, presenting his own hand to the priestess as he knelt before her. “If Young Master Yuhui and Lady Jiling believe my humble abilities adequate, it would be my honor to attend to the Prince’s wellbeing.”

When Yuhui smiled, it was for the fact that he knew he’d get to see the boy from the temple again. He wouldn’t have to beg his parents to take him to pray or scheme up a world of excuses for a chance to see that new, beautiful face he’d discovered, hidden away from him on that mountain for so long. When that smile twisted into his more typical grin, it was because he was looking forward to reuniting with his older brother and bragging about all the anythings that happened to him, to pull the simple fold of his robe aside and show the first heir the verse inscribed down the flesh of his chest.

The Prince let his eyes fall to the crown of the kneeling youth while he spoke to his keeper. “Are my parents okay with this?”

“They will have to be,” Jiling said as she took her pupil’s injured hand in her own and placed her palm atop the wound. Copper filament tracers along the tops of her fingers emanated a soft blue, the color of electric peacock down atop a glowing summer sea. “I’m afraid the mountain requires my presence. I will no longer be able to attend to your needs, my Prince.”

Laike winced and inhaled sharply. The pain of healing was oftentimes worse than the pain of the wound itself. Injury was suffered over time; Jiling’s healing was a reversal that happened all at once, a red-shock rewind reminder that the path to a soul’s completion was fraught: hardship and hurt could not be shied from if one intended to reach the summit.

The boy with his chaos staid for the quietude of life nodded. He was sure that even if they found the switch disagreeable that he possessed enough power to sway them: a perfectly placed pout, a slow and melodramatic turning of his chin away from their eyes, a sniffle and welling tears—or any combination of those plays. That boy of nineteen had a whole stable of sympathy cards he was happy to pull and deploy.

“Well,” Yuhui said after a moment, simple and honest, “I’ll miss you, Lady Jiling. I hope you will still come to the city to visit.”

“Perhaps—but perhaps it would be better for you to come to temple and pray, Young Master. Regardless, it is Laike’s first time in the city since he ascended to Yunji,” Jiling remarked, looking back in the Tian heir’s direction as she unwrapped the bloody bindings to reveal a barely scarred palm. “If it is not too much trouble, perhaps you can accompany my disciple to the swordmaster’s side. I believe he took Miyan to the market with Jiewei and Chongwei.”

“I do not wish to burden the prince,” Laike objected sharply, wan in the full spectrum of his hopeful tone.

“You’re not a burden,” the royal boy assured Laike directly, “I want to take you.” Though his treatments occurred frequently and consistently, it wasn’t very often that Yuhui visited the market after their completion—plus, he had long since decided to take whatever chance he was given to better know the younger boy at his side.

Yu met that shadow-dressed calligrapher once more with surety in his eyes, a certain sweetness blurring the line laid between beckoning and bidding. “So let’s go.”

Jiling smiled as the boys set off: Yuhui so gregarious and curious, Laike so reserved, watching every movement like a threat from the edge of his shadowscape.

Xueyu wasn’t the only person on the mountain with a mind toward alliances.