Chapter 27: Two Shadows

Nobody moved.

Seo-ah’s nails were in my back. My heart was trying to climb out of my mouth. The candle on her desk was throwing our two shadows across the paper wall, big and tangled and completely obvious.

"Yun Seo-ah," said Instructor Cha. "I’m not going to say it a third time."

Seo-ah looked at me. Her eyes were huge.

Then she did the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.

She sat up, wrapped her sleeping robe around herself, walked across her crumpled list, and slid the door open.

Cha stood in the corridor with a lantern in one hand. Practice uniform. Black sash. Ponytail high. Her eyes went past Seo-ah, into the room, and landed on me.

Shirtless. Bandaged. Lying in a capital disciple’s bed.

Her face didn’t change at all.

"Baek Mu-jin," she said.

"Instructor."

"You have three damaged meridians and a cracked rib."

"I’ve been told."

"And you climbed onto the roof of the women’s dormitory."

"Tae-man helped."

From the bushes outside, very faintly: "...Honk."

Cha closed her eyes for a long moment. Like she was praying for patience.

Then she stepped into the room and slid the door shut behind her.

Seo-ah backed up until she hit her desk. "Instructor, it’s my fault. I asked him. I—"

"I know you asked him." Cha set her lantern down. "He doesn’t climb walls uninvited. He climbs over them to get away."

Then she looked down.

At the floor. At the paper.

She bent and picked up one of the crumpled sheets. Unfolded it. Read it. Her eyes moved down the page. Things I have decided. One. Two. Three. Four.

The crossed-out five.

She read it for a long time.

Then she looked up at Seo-ah. And something in her face changed. The ice cracked a little.

"Your father’s letter," Cha said quietly. "The marriage. I heard about it this afternoon."

Seo-ah’s chin went up. "Yes, Instructor."

"Minister Jang’s second son."

"Yes, Instructor."

"I’ve met him. At a banquet in the capital, years ago. He talked about horses for an hour." Cha folded the list very carefully, along its original creases. "I was nineteen when my family arranged mine. Deputy Headmaster Ryu was sixty-one. Nobody asked me anything. Nobody let me make a list."

She held the folded paper out to Seo-ah.

Seo-ah took it. Her hands were shaking.

"I walk this corridor every night," said Cha. "It takes one hour to go around the whole building. When I come back past this door—" she picked up her lantern "—there had better be only one shadow on that wall. Or I’ll have to report it."

She walked to the door. Slid it open.

Then she stopped. Looked back. Not at Seo-ah. At me.

"Be careful with her," said Instructor Cha Mi-ran. "Or I will break the rest of your ribs myself."

And she was gone.

The door slid shut.

Her footsteps went down the corridor. Slow. Even. Measured.

Seo-ah and I stared at each other.

"Did that..." she whispered. "Did that just happen?"

"I think," I said, "Instructor Cha just gave us an hour."

She came back to the bed slowly. Sat on the edge. Looked down at the folded list in her lap.

Then she set it on the desk. Very neatly. And let the robe fall off her shoulders again.

This time she wasn’t shaking.

She lay down facing me. Knees touching. Her hand on my bandages. Her eyes on mine.

"Where were we," she said.

"Learning a form."

"Right." Her lips twitched. "Slowly."

I kissed her. And it was different now. Not frantic. Not scared of footsteps. Like the hour Cha gave us was a gift, and she wanted to open it carefully.

I kissed her everywhere I could reach without my ribs screaming. Her neck. Her shoulders. The soft inside of her wrist where the blue ribbon was tied. She laughed when I did that, a breathless little laugh, and then stopped laughing when I kept going down her arm, and then the side of her chest, and then lower, slow, tasting the salt on her skin, until she grabbed a fistful of my hair and gasped my name into the dark.

She was trembling again. But not from fear.

When she finally pulled me back up and over her, the candle had burned down to a stub.

I stopped. Right at the edge. Held myself there, arms shaking, my ribs on fire, looking down at her face in the dying light.

"Seo-ah," I said. "Before... I want to hear you say it. Not on paper."

She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet. Her cheeks were burning.

"This is my first time," she said. Clear. Steady. Like she was reciting it in front of the whole academy. "Nobody has ever... I’ve never. You’re the first." She reached up and touched my face. "And I choose it. I choose you. Number one on the list."

I couldn’t say anything.

In my last life, nobody ever chose me for anything. Not a team. Not a project. Not a seat on the bus.

And this girl — this stubborn, brave, beautiful girl who’d planned her own first time on twenty crumpled pages — was looking up at me like I was the only thing she’d ever decided for herself.

"Slowly," she whispered.

"Slowly," I promised.

And I kept it.

The candle went out somewhere in the middle.

Neither of us noticed.

When Cha’s footsteps came back down the corridor an hour later, slow and even, there was only one shadow on the wall.

Because there was no candle anymore.

And because I was already on the roof.

Seo-ah had walked me to the window wrapped in her sheet, hair everywhere, glowing like someone had lit a lantern inside her. She kissed me once more through the window frame, quick and hard.

"Ten days," she whispered.

"I know."

"I’m going to use every one of them."

Then she shut the window.

I slid down the roof, dropped into the bushes, and landed directly on top of Gong Tae-man, who had fallen asleep.

"HONK—" he yelled, waking up.

"It’s me. It’s me. Shut up."

He stared at me in the dark. At my face.

"...Bro," he said, very quietly. "You’re crying."

"No I’m not."

"You’re totally crying."

"It’s the ribs."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he just put an arm around my shoulders, carefully, avoiding the bandages, and walked me to the ferry without saying another word.

Best friend I ever had. Either life.

The sun was coming up when I climbed the stairs of the Blue Willow Inn. Every step was agony. All I wanted was a bed.

Ayla’s door was unbarred. She’d left it open for me, like she did every night since the tusk.

I slipped inside. The room was dim and warm and smelled like cinnamon. She was a lump under the blankets, gold hair spilling across the pillow, sword lying on the floor beside the bed where she could grab it.

I crawled in behind her. Naked. Too tired to do anything else.

She stirred. Rolled over. Opened one eye.

Sniffed me.

"...The capital girl," she mumbled.

"Yeah."

She looked at my face for a long moment in the gray light. Whatever she saw there, it made her expression go soft.

"She was first time," Ayla said. Not a question.

"...Yeah."

Ayla sighed. Then she pulled me into her chest, wrapped both arms around my head, and pressed her lips into my hair.

"Good horse," she murmured. "You were gentle. I can tell." Her hand slid slowly down my back. Then lower. "Now you are home. Now you eat."

I was too tired. I was way too tired.

My body did not agree.

She noticed. Of course she noticed. She laughed low in her chest and rolled on top of me, sleepy and warm and heavy, her hair falling around both our faces like a gold curtain, and she kissed me slow and lazy and—

"MY DESERT FLOWER!"

We froze.

The voice came from the walkway. Right outside. Loud. Cheerful. A man’s voice I’d only heard once before, crackling through a paper talisman.

"SURPRISE! The caravan account was short, so I left the boys at the river crossing and rode back myself! I’ve been riding all night! Open up, flower, I brought you dates!"

Ayla’s husband.

Ayla stared down at me. All the sleep vanished from her face.

The door handle rattled.

She moved. Faster than I’d ever seen her move, even with a sword. She grabbed my arm, hauled me off the bed, yanked open the big painted wardrobe in the corner, and shoved me in. Naked. Into a forest of silk dresses and cinnamon and darkness.

The wardrobe door clicked shut an inch from my nose.

I heard her run back to the bed. Heard the blankets. Heard her voice go sleepy and sweet.

"Husband? Is that you?"

The door slid open. Heavy footsteps. A big laugh. The rustle of travel clothes.

"Who else, flower! Look at you, still in bed!" A pause. "Gods, I stink. Riding all night. Where’s my clean robe? The blue one?"

"In... in the chest. By the window."

"No, no, I left it in the wardrobe last time."

Footsteps.

Coming closer.

I was pressed into the back of the wardrobe between two silk dresses, naked, holding my breath so hard my cracked rib was screaming.

Through the crack in the wardrobe door, I saw a shadow fall across it.

Then a big, hairy merchant’s hand closed around the handle.