The carriage had been climbing since dawn.

The road out of the plains had begun its slow lean upward sometime in the small hours, and by the time the sun cleared the rim of the eastern hills, the stretch behind the wheels lay a measurable degree lower than the stretch ahead. Morning light came through the carriage window at a slant Lin Xuan had not seen since they left Yuncheng. The body of the carriage rocked a fraction harder on uneven stone, the way a body rocked when the wheels had stopped meeting flat ground.

Three of them inside, on benches arranged in a small triangle. Plain Steel rested against the inner wall at the angle a sword rested at when its owner did not yet expect to need it but had not put it away either.

Wei Tianming had been holding a question in his teeth for most of the morning.

He finally let it out.

"Young Master. May I ask something."

"Go ahead."

"I would like to ask about technique."

Lin Xuan let him hang there a beat, the way an older brother let a younger brother hang on the front edge of his own request to be certain the request was real. Wei did not waver. He held the posture he kept at sword forms in the practice yard - back upright, hands flat on his knees, attention pointed at the place a teacher’s voice was about to come from.

Across the small space between them, Lian had been folding a sash and pretending the conversation was none of her business. She put the sash down anyway.

"Sit straighter than that, Wei. Hands on your knees, palms up. Do not try to direct anything yet. You are going to learn to listen to your own body breathing before you ask the body to do anything for you."

Wei straightened. The carriage absorbed a stone in the road. He held the posture through it.

"The Nine Dragons Breathing Art is the spine of every Form I have shown in the tournament. The Forms are visible. The breathing is invisible. If the breath is wrong, the Form becomes theatre. If the breath is right, the Form does what they need to do."

"Yes, Young Master."

"Four counts in. Four counts held at the top. Four counts out. Four counts of nothing at the bottom. We will repeat this hundred-fold before noon and you will hate me by midday meal."

Wei nodded once, as if hate-by-midday-meal was a contractual term he was willing to sign.

"Why four counts on every side, Young Master? Why not unequal?"

"Because at your stage, even is the door. Once you can ride four-four-four-four without the body fighting the count, you will earn the right to learn the cadences that are not even. The dragon does not sit on a calendar, Wei. But the apprentice does."

Lin Xuan demonstrated one cycle. The air around him went still for the four counts at the top, the way air went still around a man whose lungs had stopped being a man’s lungs and become something else for the duration of a held breath. Wei watched, then tried.

He held seven. He gave up at eight. He let out a noisy exhale that fogged the carriage window for a beat.

Across the bench, Lian set the sash down. Her voice arrived at the measured calm of a woman who had been waiting for this exact pause all morning.

"And while we are on the subject of important conversations, Young Master. Have you thought about what you are going to tell Young Mistress Su when she rides through our gate in two months?"

Lin Xuan, who had been mid-second cycle of his own demonstration, choked the four counts at the top into a flat dry cough. Wei discovered that the wooden grain of the carriage ceiling carried more interesting detail than he had previously appreciated.

Lian did not glance up from the sash. The corner of her mouth was the only piece of her face she let move.

"Lian."

"Yes, Young Master."

"There is a time and a place."

"And the place is this carriage and the time is this morning. The Young Mistress is a serious woman. She will not appreciate a young master who has not given the matter the courtesy of a single quiet hour between today and the day she rides up our mountain."

Lin Xuan opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, because the inside of a carriage was a small room and the silence after a question from Lian carried a particular weight a young master did not get to ignore.

"I have not had the time, Lian. It has been one day."

"And in that one day, has anything of her stayed in your head?"

He did not answer immediately, which Lian took as the answer she had walked into the morning to collect. The line of her mouth firmed by a thread. There was curiosity in the firming, and a small careful brace behind the curiosity, the brace of a maid who had known her Young Master a long time and was watching him weigh another life against the one she had helped him build.

"That is what I thought, Young Master."

Mira’s panel arrived in his vision a beat later, at the angle a friend’s elbow arrived at a man’s ribs.

[ You are lying to the poor girl, Xuan. You absolutely have been thinking about her. The seed she planted is sprouting on schedule. (¬‿¬) ]

’Mira. You are not helping.’

[ I am helping. I am helping the historical record. ]

Lin Xuan inhaled the four counts he had been trying to inhale before the conversation derailed.

"Wei. Back to the count."

"Yes, Young Master."

—————————————————————

Lian let the lesson resume for the length of perhaps six full cycles. Wei was beginning to find the rhythm. The cup at his ribs had stopped fighting the count. The dantian below the cup was still empty - Wei was nowhere near drawing Qi yet - but the body was learning the shape the cup would take when it eventually had something to hold.

Then, without raising her face from the sash, Lian slid sideways into a topic that was much safer to her and considerably less safe to anyone listening closely.

"Speaking of arrangements and marriages and the politics of the great houses. The kitchen women at the Yuncheng residence had three months of capital gossip waiting to be delivered before we left. I am still digesting half of it."

Wei, mid-inhale, made the smallest audible noise of interest.

"What did they sa—"

The flat of Lin Xuan’s hand met the back of Wei’s head without the rest of his body bothering to come along.

Thwack.

"Ouch—"

"The count, Wei. Not the kitchen women."

"Yes, Young Master."

Lian did not pause her gossip. She did, very privately, smile.

"They said the Emperor still has not named his heir. The Second Prince is calling in favours along the western circuit. The Third Princess has retreated to a temple to study, which is the polite way of saying somebody has politely hidden her from public view. And the Fourth Prince—"

Here Lian rolled her eyes in the small economical way a maid rolled her eyes when she had run out of patience with a piece of gossip even as she repeated it.

"—the Fourth Prince spent the whole winter in brothels. He apparently keeps a favourite singer in three different cities. A blessing of the heavens, the women said. A blessing that at least one of the Emperor’s sons does not have the energy to conspire."

Lin Xuan filed it absently. The demonstration carried on. Mira, at the edge of his vision, sent him a single short panel he almost did not notice.

[ A blessing indeed. ]

The voice she used when she was reading something through carefully and did not yet want him to know she was reading it.

He moved on.

—————————————————————

Wei stopped fighting the count somewhere in his tenth cycle.

The breath went in over four, held at the top for four, came out over four, rested at the bottom for four. The apprentice on the bench across from Lin Xuan stopped being a boy holding his breath and became a person breathing.

Lin Xuan let his attention drift to the window.

The road had climbed during the lesson. The plains behind them had folded down into themselves the way plains folded when one’s eye lifted into the foothills. Ahead, on the long line where the road met the sky, the first true relief had begun to gather - slate-blue at the base, white-grey at the crown, the unmistakable serration of stone old enough to remember things younger sects had forgotten.

But that was not what held him.

Above the road, the sky had been clear at dawn. It was clear no longer. A flat slab of cloud was crossing in from the western side of the range at the pace clouds crossed when nothing on the ground had given them permission, and the underside of the slab carried the dirty grey-green of weather that had decided what it was going to do but had not yet announced it.

"Looks like it is going to rain soon, Mira. The skies have closed."

[ Yes. The road will be wet by midday. ]

’Anything on the wicks?’

[ Mei. Violet. Same rhythm as the inn. No new operator. Lin Kai. Flickering red, a finger steadier than yesterday. The rest of them gold. ]

Soul Lamp warm against his ribs. Plain Steel against the inner wall. Wei breathing four-four-four-four under his nose. Lian folding the same sash for what was by now an unreasonable number of repetitions, although Lin Xuan was not going to be the one to point it out.

Above the road, the slab of cloud had finished arriving.

The sky had received news the road below it had not yet been told.

The carriage rolled on into a morning the sky had already finished reading.