once upon a dream

by isabilightwood

Summary:

A woman in mourning robes is haunting Qin Su's dreams. In the daylight, someone is threatening her son's life. When she travels to Yunmeng in secret with A-Song, her dreams lead her to the woman's identity and the truths of her own history.

Or, Wei Wuxian saved Jiang Yanli's life with a sleeping spell at nightless city. Now she needs Qin Su to wake her up.

Notes:

This fic was inspired by Raine.Diamond's absolutely gorgeous art as a collab for this year's MDZS RBB. The art can be found here as well as embedded in chapter 3. I was excited to write for a new and different pairing, and I always love a fairytale curse (spell) inspired prompt!

Thank you also to Raine for betaing!

Chapter 1

The dream lingered long after waking, visible still in the waking hours, as if printed by woodblock onto the back of her eyelids. A woman in white, the undyed linen of mourning dragging her feet back and forth through the water, seated on the edge of a dock that extended back, infinitely into the cloudy edges of perception.

She was lovely, as one might expect of an imaginary woman in a dream, and she was crying. Tears rolled down her face over the finest bone structure Qin Su had ever seen, the perfect bow of her lips trembling.

A gust of wind blew back the woman’s hair, and she caught sight of Qin Su. There was a flash of steel in her eyes and then — the first ray of morning sunlight passed over her eyes, and Qin Su sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding in her throat.

This was the third night in a row Qin Su had dreamed of the same woman, but this was the first time she had seen her face. Never before had Qin Su remembered her dreams in such detail, down to the delicate point of the woman’s chin.

“Are you all right, Jin-furen?” One of Qin Su’s attendants rapped on her bedroom door. It was Bai Lin sleeping the next room over today, from the sound of her voice. It was a necessary security measure, her husband had told her upon his ascension, after so many deaths in the family in recent years. It was also a hollow one when every servant in Lanling knew her husband did not share her bed. Prospective assassins would do better to target Jin Guangyao’s friends, Lan Xichen or Nie Huaisang, or — heavens forfend — his son or nephew than his wife.

But Qin Su could not protest that her father had ensured she, his youngest child, had been trained to the same level as her elder siblings. Skill in cultivation had not saved Jin Zixuan or Jin Guangshan, or her own eldest brother, who had fallen during the war. As the wife of the Chief Cultivator, she wanted for nothing but privacy, attended to at all times by everyone in Jinlintai save her husband.

Privacy, and equal companionship. Once, she had believed her marriage would offer the latter. Until her new husband had looked at her seated on the bed meant to be theirs, his gaze cold and distant, and turned away to never touch her in private again.

Most of the time she did not mind the company. Bai Lin and Fan Xinyi were excellent conversationalists, sparring partners, and aids, though the difference in their status would always be a barrier in the way of true friendship.

Qin Su placed a hand over her heart and inhaled deeply to calm her racing heart. “Just a dream,” she called to Bai Lin. “But I’ll rise now, before A-Song wakes and runs roughshod all over us.”

At three, Jin Rusong had begun to grow out of his early poor health and become a font of energy from dawn until he invariably tired out in early afternoon. Most mornings, he woke her before the intended hour by throwing himself bodily onto her stomach, a habit she would have to break him of before he grew much bigger. But for now, it was easiest to believe her daily mantra that her son and her work were all she needed when A-Song was clinging to her, chittering like a songbird about whatever had just caught his fancy.

Today, Qin Su managed to dress before A-Song came barreling into her. “A-Niang, A-Niang! Ling-gege says they have flying squirrels in Yunmeng! Can we go see them? Please please please.”

“Did you wake up your cousin already?” She thought an invective emphatically. That boy was a scourge upon Jinlintai when he was tired.

“He didn’t mind!” her son lied with puffy-cheeked faux innocence. “He said I should come ask you if I could go. Can we? Right now?”

To snatch a bit more sleep, no doubt, and because six-year-old Jin Ling was always coming up with excuses to make extensive visits to his uncle in Yunmeng, who spoiled him terribly despite his gruff exterior.

“Did he now? Well, Yunmeng is too far to travel in a day, and if we head out right now, someone else will eat all the laodoufu the cook made for your breakfast.”

“No!” He twisted side to side while keeping hold of her legs, rumpling her skirts.

“Then we better hurry along.” She offered her hand for him to hold — he had recently grown too big to carry on her hip, a relief, after how she’d worried over him — but he hesitated before taking it.

“But Yunmeng, A-Niang.”

 “Perhaps we can plan something later this year. Your A-Niang has never been to Yunmeng either.” Qin Su took satisfaction in fulfilling her duties, and fulfilling them well, but if she was honest with herself — only ever with herself — she could use some time away.

 

At breakfast — for which A-Ling, who had indeed gone back to sleep, did not join them — A-Song slurped up his tofu between run-on descriptions of what he imagined the so-called flying squirrels would look like, and left scattered bits of one of her mantou across the table.

He was learning to chew with his mouth closed.

Slowly.

After, she dropped him off with his first tutor of the day with a kiss on the forehead. By midday, he would be ink-stained and grinning, having painstakingly filled several sheets of paper with splotches of ink and shaky lines. A-Song’s education was among the few things Qin Su could be certain she and her husband agreed on. He would have the best tutors Lanling could provide.

Qin Su habitually spent her mornings checking on the progress of one of the classes of adolescent disciples, a task that would ordinarily would have fallen to a sibling or cousin of the Jin sect leader. As those were either dead or layabouts, and Qin Su had received far more extensive training than her husband, she had taken up the task. It was her second favorite part of the day, after reading A-Song his bedtime stories.

Today, she joined the second eldest group, aged between fourteen to sixteen, when disciples first began going on supervised night hunts. When she approached, they were in the middle of finishing their exercises, building the techniques that made up Lanling Jin’s style into muscle memory. Their training had been more than a little disorganized when Qin Su first came to Lanling, in the aftermath of the murders of Jin Zixuan and Jin Zixun, with students frequently skipping class and the teachers choosing lessons according to their own whims without coordination. Qin Su had worked to coordinate a smooth lesson plan and restore attendance and discipline, ensuring that the disciples lived up to the reputation of one of the Great Sects.

But she frowned, watching them. When the disciples completed their exercises as one and bowed to her in greeting, she asked, “Where is Mo Xuanyu?”

Two disciples in the first row exchanged a grimace, and one, Hong Simu, a tall boy still coming into a broadening build, answered. “We thought you would be joining our seniors today, Jin-furen.”

Usually on the fifth day of the week, Qin Su would observe the training of the eldest of the junior disciples, but there had been a report of a minor haunting by the ghost of a grandfather who felt disrespected by his descendants. It was an ideal opportunity for an unsupervised group night, with a senior disciple a signal flare away, and so she had sent them off chattering excitedly, and switched her days around.

 Qin Su raised a brow. “And does Mo Xuanyu typically only join you when he knows I’ll be here?”

Another exchange of glances, and some whispers in the back, before Hong Simu shrugged. “Well, yeah.”

“Do you know where he is?” When Hong Simu nodded, she added, “Please go retrieve him.”

While he was off fetching Mo Xuanyu, Qin Su gestured for a girl who had a tendency to over-balance on sliding thrusts to spar with her, correcting mistakes as they exchanged blows.

Qin Su had just tapped a third student’s chest with the tip of her sword when Hong Simu reappeared, dragging Mo Xuanyu quite literally by the ear. “Let go of him!” she demanded sharply, and Hong Simu’s arms snapped to his sides. Mo Xuanyu dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut and remained there. “Hong-gongzi, I asked you to retrieve Mo Xuanyu, not drag him here with less care than you’d show a sack of laundry.”

Hong Simu’s hands balled into fists, and while he didn’t dare to meet her eyes, he glared down at Mo Xuanyu with a dark fury. She didn’t miss the way Mo Xuanyu tried not to flinch and failed.

“Mo-gongzi,” Qin Su said more gently. “As you are not, in fact, a sack of laundry, get to your feet. I want you to watch carefully while I spar with Hong-gongzi.”

Though he grumbled mutinously under his breath, Mo Xuanyu obeyed, holding himself at a remove from his classmates as Hong Simu drew his sword and moved into position.

Bubbling with misdirected, angry humiliation, Hong Simu was unbalanced and sloppy. Only a few moves into their match, he tried to charge her.

There was no point, her father had always taught her, in letting a student believe themselves more capable than their limits. A teacher should not disarm a student with the first move unless demonstrating a move, but they should also never go too easy and let them win. No monster would ever go easy, after all.

Qin Su flicked the sword out of the bully’s hand. He stumbled past, falling to one knee before he caught himself. “Reflect on your treatment of others, and why you just lost, Hong-gongzi.” He wouldn’t without more private intervention from someone other than her, of course. The cultivation theory instructor, perhaps, who was their newest hire, and the most universally liked among the students. “Mo-gongzi, tell me, how did I do that?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Mo Xuanyu gave his answer like it was obvious. “You waited until Hong Simu attacked to cross your sword with his and used his momentum against him.”

Most of his classmates, who, apparently, attended class far more frequently, would not have spotted that so easily. “I’ve noticed before that you have an eye for seeing how things work. Now, I’d like you to demonstrate with me.”

“I’m not — I’m not a strong cultivator.” Mo Xuanyu protested, which was beside the point, but explained his tendency to shrink to the back, to try to disappear behind his fellow students despite his cleverness in his written exam results and having the favor of his elder brother, the sect leader.

“Not everything requires physical strength,” she reminded him, and brought her sword up for him to engage.

He almost had it on the first try, but at the last moment, his grip shifted, and his sword dropped into the dirt, sending up a cloud of dust.

“You felt where your sword caught against mine before you dropped it?”

He nodded.

“Try again,” she told him, and a moment later her sword flew from her grasp and landed point down in the dirt, quivering. “Very good. Perhaps now you can feel how this technique does not require a strong core — or indeed strong biceps — to execute in combat. Merely knowledge, and practice. Practice is a necessity.”

Mo Xuanyu flushed, letting the tip of his as yet-unsheathed sword drag in the dirt. 

Qin Su turned to consider the instructor, a holdover from Jin Guangshan’s days, about whom she had never heard claims of harassment and who had passed her evaluation for competency two years earlier. Before he had Mo Xuanyu, who might be considered soft for a man, as a student. She would at the least have to move him to a different class, after this, and reevaluate whether his performance could improve. “Song-xiansheng, you may resume your lesson. Xuanyu, I would like to speak to you for a moment.”

She gestured for Bai Lin and Fan Xinyi to keep a short distance behind them. Fan Xinyi pointed out a flying insect that had just landed on a nearby flower to Bai Lin and began to regale her with its behavioral patterns as a show that they weren’t listening. Though Bai Lin would be anyway. She always was.

Qin Su walked a short way in silence with her hands clasped behind her back. Mo Xuanyu kept a careful half-step behind her, even when she slowed to match his pace.

“I’d like to apologize for sending such a bully to bring you to class,” she said when they were far enough removed, arriving at a pond in the gardens. It had been built by Jin Zixuan for his betrothed, but the lotuses he had planted with his own hands were long gone, replaced by reeds and frequented by ducks.

Mo Xuanyu shrugged. “It’s not like you had many options if you were looking for someone who doesn’t hate me.”

A glance his expression confirmed her suspicions. “This is a regular problem. From more than one of your classmates. I will speak with your teachers.”

“It won’t do much good,” he said sullenly. “I’m old Jin-zongzhu’s by-blow, and I can barely swing a sword or jump on a roof.”

“You’ll never be Hanguang-jun, it’s true. Nor will I. Few people have that talent for cultivation, but we play to our own strengths. You, for instance, are a very clever young man.” Over Mo Xuanyu’s protests, she continued, “Even after Wei Wuxian killed three thousand people at Nightless City singlehanded and left a legacy that has reinvented cultivation, cleverness is underrated.”

“The Yiling Laozu fought three thousand. He only killed two hundred,” Mo Xuanyu corrected her with an indignant huff.

“Indeed he did. How many of your classmates would have called me on that? They believe the rumors without question, but you make the effort to learn the truth.” This time, he met her eyes, and she found a heartbreakingly fragile hope there. How rare was it for this boy to receive a compliment, or even a kind word? That would have to change. “Cultivate your cleverness and your golden core, Mo Xuanyu. Golden cores may not be everything, but they are a useful tool.”

Qin Su reached out to brush what looked like ash off his shoulder, but it moved, skittering to avoid her touch, vanishing into the shadow beneath his collar.

“A spider,” she said, though they both knew it was no such thing. “I’m going to give you lessons, just two hours a week.” Less than he deserved — and less than he likely needed, if he was dabbling in demonic cultivation, but it was all the time she could fit in her schedule. “And your teachers will tell me if you are skipping class from now on. I trust it was only swordplay?”

“The gentlemanly arts and cultivation theory are far more interesting than getting hit with swords.” Mo Xuanyu wrinkled his nose, and she laughed.

“I will see you tomorrow, Mo Xuanyu, and you will try to hit me with your sword. We will see how you feel then,” she said. “What you do with the rest of your time, I will not attempt to pry. But if you ever think you might be in over your head, with bullies, or… anything else, know you can come to me.”

He bowed, overly formal, the way an outer disciple should, rather than her teenage brother-in-law. “I will keep that in mind.”

 

Qin Su drew the final line in a column of figures, bringing balance to Jinlintai’s weekly grocery expenses, and the door opened, admitting a man on near-silent feet. Her husband, deciding to grace her with his presence. A rare occasion, made more so by his turning to her attendant and giving her an order phrased as a request to leave.

Jin Guangyao held his hands behind his back, holding himself like he had been born to lead, their golden surroundings his due. Unlike other sect leaders, he invited questions from the lowest in his service, but still, he was not to be disobeyed.

Fan Xinyi stood without a word, bowing low to her sect leader, but took the tray of tea that had only just been served with her when she left. Though Qin Su had never given orders to that effect, Jin Guangyao was never given refreshments in her apartments. Though he was far too inscrutable to tell if he took offense, she was certain he had noticed — he had once deduced her favorite flower based on where her gaze lingered during a walk through the Jinlintai gardens and gifted her a pot of azaleas. Beautiful and dangerous, he had called her, blushing, like the azaleas which were poisonous if ingested, but he couldn’t stay away.

That had been a lie.

“How was your day, A-Su?” Jin Guangyao asked. Conversationally, like they debriefed at the end of each day, and did not lead their lives in effective parallel with only their son keeping their marriage intact.

“How was my day?” she repeated with flat amusement. “What brought this on?”

“Perhaps I wished to visit my wife.” He reached for her hand but pulled up short when she flinched before he could make contact. “Can you not find it in yourself to humor me?”

Qin Su humored his ideas for the cultivation world, his desire to pretend their marriage was still a relationship and not just business in public. She was under no obligation to humor his whims in private. “You’ll see my report in a few hours.”

“Have you started including details of your moods and favorite moments, or what A-Song learned today?” He smiled blandly. “A-Song was asleep when I went to see him after my meetings.”

“Ah.” If nothing else, Jin Guangyao loved their son, tried his best to fit time with A-Song into his packed schedule, and treated her as a valued ally. It was more than far too many women had in their marriages. “A-Ling has roped our son into his plot to escape his lessons and spend the summer lazing around on the Yunmeng lakes.”

Jin Guangyao always flinched, just slightly when she referred to A-Song as theirs. She wished she knew what had happened to turn his tender professions of love into this, but he made excuses to leave whenever she tried to bring up the topic of their lack of relationship, as if she had not long given up hope of his warming to her once more.

To her surprise, Jin Guangyao hummed, his mouth twisting in contemplation. “Perhaps it would not be a bad idea. Jiang-zongzhu has asked — or rather demanded — for us to send A-Ling to him until opposition to my watchtowers dies down. There have been …threats.”

She slammed her brush down onto the table, her tone rising in anger past her careful control. “And I’m just hearing about this now?”

“None of them were credible until today. Until I received this.” Jin Guangyao drew a box from behind his back, opening it to reveal a doll splattered in blood, cradled in a hand that had been sawed off at the wrist. The doll was that of a child in gold robes with a red dot in the center of its forehead, thumb angled toward its painted mouth, and a gash painted across the throat.

Qin Su gasped, clasping her hand over her mouth.

“This belonged to our disciple at the watchtower at Weishan lake. I’ve sent a team to find what’s left,” he said. “And I believe it would be… expedient to take the threat seriously.”

He had received this gruesome message before meeting with her, and she never would have guessed. Sometimes her husband’s ability to keep a placid, smiling face through the worst the world had to offer terrified her. “I can have things arranged to leave in two days. I agree, Yunmeng will be safer for the boys.”

“Will you stay there? Of course, I would never ask you to risk your safety, but…” He looked embarrassed, but was he truly capable of feeling such a thing?

“I’ll spend a week there, maybe two, to get A-Song settled, and return well in advance of the conference,” Qin Su decided. She would not like to leave her own work attended for long, in any case. And now, with the upcoming discussion conference, her promise to Mo Xuanyu, and this threat, she would not. “Whoever is threatening my son should hope you find them first.”

“Thank you, A-Su,” Jin Guangyao said, with an odd, sad smile. “For understanding.”

 Understanding was something she suspected they would never have between them.

 

With young children in tow, it took a full ten-day week to reach Lotus Pier. Six days by cart to meet the Yangtze River after it flowed out of Gusu, masquerading as a family of peddlers. They were unconvincing to villagers and farmers they met along the way, given that Qin Su and her attendants were armed, but beneath the notice of the sects plotting against Jin Guangyao.

Or so was the hope.

Jin Ling was delighted with the chance to play tour guide, his little chest puffing up when he pointed out a baiji, or a finless porpoise, surfacing in the current. A-Song hung on his every word, even when Qin Su was nearly certain he’d lied about witnessing his jiujiu’s defeats of water ghouls and other aquatic dangers. Jiang Wanyin was far too exacting in his demands for Jin Ling’s day-to-day safety measures to take the boy nighthunting for at least another five years. Even then, she suspected Jiang Wanyin would dog Jin Ling’s steps and hide behind trees until, eventually, Jin Ling found a chance to slip the leash. Jiang Wanyin’s worries over the safety of his only remaining family were understandable. But the number of times she’d been forced to write back that Jin Ling was fine, and she couldn’t protect him from every scraped knee gave her concerns about how he would react to Qin Su going to him to help protect her own son.

Her attendants were likewise occupied. Bai Lin worked on her current double-sided embroidery project, depicting a crane on one side and peonies on the other, when her stomach could handle the rocking of the boat. Fan Xinyi made records of the insects she counted buzzing around them.

And when A-Song was not pulling at her sleeve, pointing out new sights and sounds, Qin Su had an unprecedented amount of time to sit alone with her thoughts, though she preferred to contemplate the woman who continued to haunt her dreams.

Had the woman been someone she knew and loved — or hated — or had Qin Su recently moved into a house where someone had been murdered, Qin Su would have assumed she was being haunted and acted accordingly. An object or building that had gained consciousness might cause distressing dreams, but they would have ceased when she left the source behind. These dreams continued unabated.

 Every night when Qin Su closed her eyes, the woman in white was waiting, whether there was a pillow beneath her head in a lumpy inn bed or she was curled together with her son on a bench in the cabin of the surprisingly small boat Jiang Wanyin sent to meet them.

She was always silent, though tears no longer rolled down her cheeks. She noticed Qin Su more quickly, her gaze growing sharper, more alert, and more curious with each passing night.

The night before they were due to arrive at Lotus Pier, Qin Su drifted off to the gentle rocking of the boat and came aware of waves lapping against a dock that swayed in the wind. Rain fell in sheets, soaking Qin Su to the skin instantly, and clearing away some of the usual fog. The dark water was painted in color, emerald green lotus leaves and pale pink lotuses in full bloom, but the end of the dock was empty, the woman not in her customary place. Qin Su spun around, searching for someplace she might have taken shelter, and found her standing behind her, as if waiting.

When their eyes met, the woman gestured toward the shore, starting toward it. And there was a shore, hints of cliffs covered in green visible, distorted through the rain and lingering gray. The woman looked back but once, halfway, to see if Qin Su was following. She hadn’t been, but stepped forward, and the woman nodded sharply in satisfaction before continuing.

Walking the length of the dock felt impossibly long, yet the distance behind her was short, as if planks already trodden were disappearing and appearing ahead, slowing her progress. Finally, Qin Su stepped onto a muddy path that squelched underfoot and followed the woman a short way to a sloping recess in the cliff with steps as high as Qin Su was tall leading up halfway, almost convincing as a natural effect of erosion. At first it looked like the steps led to nowhere, ending in a vertical sheet of lichen-covered rock, but the woman pointed to it, mouthing something urgently that might have been please —

— And Qin Su woke with a pained gasp, her ribs smarting where A-Song had kicked her in his sleep.

 

Jiang Wanyin seemed to be fighting a smile when A-Ling launched himself into him for the tightest hug a six-year-old could deliver. His most recent growth spurt had brought him to a height where he could reach his uncle’s waist comfortably, likely for the first time.

“You are welcome in Lotus Pier, Jin-furen, Jin-gongzi,” Jiang Wanyin said, his tone making it clear that he wished he could say they weren’t.

A-Song, who had been peeking at Jiang Wanyin from behind her skirts, hid completely.

“Thank you for your hospitality at such short notice, Jiang-zongzhu. We will try not to be an imposition,” she said, with exaggerated sweetness. “If you have tasks that need attending to, I’m certain a servant could show us around.”

“No, Jiujiu, I just got here,” Jin Ling whined.

Jiang Wanyin had not developed resistance to his nephew’s pout and so he said, woodenly, “Nothing urgent. It is not an imposition.”

Qin Su smothered the urge to laugh. There was no leader less suited to the art of diplomacy than Jiang Wanyin, and yet he put great stock in appearances of civility, and following unspoken rules.

The tour Jiang Wanyin gave was perfunctory and could have been better handled by a servant, but it allowed her to see how he interacted with his disciples in his own home right away.

“My disciples are dedicated to their training, and are not to be disturbed,” he said of an archery practice in the courtyard. He stopped and corrected the form of several young archers without a word before moving on.  “Likewise, their free time is their free time. If you need anything, you may check the duty roster and make your request to the disciples on message or kitchen duty. Do not disrupt those on laundry or cleaning duty, as you may be certain they will find an excuse not to complete it. We at Lotus Pier do not have an army of servants as you do in Lanling.”

“I scrubbed my share of floors growing up in Laoling,” she said.

Jiang Wanyin grunted. Perhaps he thought the floors were easier to scrub in Laoling.

They emerged from between buildings to find the famous lotus lakes spread out before them.

Lotus lakes. Wide open and consuming the distant horizon. In the distance to the southwest, the land rose up in hills and maybe, possibly, cliffs. Much closer, boats were tied up to a series of docks and a group of adolescents in the process of upending their own boat on purpose. Jiang Wanyin yelled that they’d be cleaning any gunk out of there, but they merely waved at him cheerfully and tipped over into the water.

“Your home is beautiful, Jiang Zongzhu. Is there a path leading around the lakes? I would love to see more of the scenery, but I’ve had enough of boats for the moment.” Qin Su held a hand over her belly, as if queasy at the thought, though in truth it was poor Bai Lin who had suffered from seasickness.

“There is a path around all of them, connecting the farms and villages in the region with Lotus Pier and Yunmeng city. If you follow it that way,” he pointed east, “you will come across a village known for its woven cloth and dyes, and of course, here in the city, we have the best tea house in the Jianghu.”

He suggested going everywhere but the direction of the landscape features of interest. Perhaps it was nothing, but…

She smiled, all innocence. “What bold claims! I’ll have to pay a visit to both.”

“Jiujiu, can I go swimming?” Jin Ling interrupted, tugging at Jiang Wanyin’s sleeve.

Jiang Wanyin hesitated. “You haven’t forgotten your lessons, have you?”

“No!”

“Then swim.” Jiang Wanyin proceeded to grab Jin Ling by the waist and toss him into the water. He came up sputtering and laughing and tried to send a wave of water up onto the dock to splash his uncle’s feet — Jiang Wanyin deftly and habitually sidestepped — before swimming off toward the disciples now attempting to right the boat, several of whom were approximately his age.

When his attempt to climb aboard tipped the boat back over, a girl approximately his own age launched herself into Jin Ling, sparking the sort of friendly battle that made for the fondest of childhood memories.

“Hey,” Jiang Wanyin yelled. “No dunking!”

He went ignored.

“Can I — “A-Song yawned, rubbing his eyes. “Can I swim too?”

“You can start learning while we’re here, when you’re not so sleepy,” she promised him. “Jiang-zongzhu, if you wish to supervise them, my son if in dire need of a nap. I believe I can find my way back to the disciples on duty.”

Jiang Wanyin grunted his acknowledgment, focused on his nephew’s antics to the exclusion of all else.

Well, Qin Su thought. That could have gone far worse.

 

The warm woods and intricate carvings of the reconstruction of Lotus Pier, and the pleasant openness of its disciples were a testament to its sect leader, even if he were personally determined to antagonize her. The disciple Qin Su called on said, “Oh, zongzhu,” with long-suffering fondness when Qin Su explained why they needed assistance finding their rooms. He then talked her ear off about how lucky he was to be a disciple of Yunmeng Jiang.

The city of Yunmeng, visible from the entrance was vibrant and prosperous, with no end of entertainment to be found.

But the sight of so many lotuses in dark water and lush surrounds had put a thought into her head that demanded investigation. And so, Qin Su left her son napping in the care of her attendants and made her way down the path around the lake in the direction that had not come recommended by her host.

It was a beautiful, if sweaty, walk in the sticky heat of a Yunmeng summer, pestered by the buzzing of persistent flies. The stormy chill of a dream housing a grieving woman did not reflect the reality of these lotus lakes, and Qin Su was tempted to turn back. But the scenery felt just this side of a match for her memories, and some unconscious need to know drove her onward. Around the first lake, over a bridge to the next, where a boardwalk meandered between deep lake and swamp, and finally on to yet a third lake.

Here, the hills she had seen from a distance rose sharply, their faces shear, made welcoming by lichen and shrubs growing in crevices. There, a dock stretching out into the water. A single boat was far out in the water, paddling among the lotuses.

Qin Su walked out along the dock, her heart rising into her throat as her chest tightened. At the end, she closed her eyes and spun around. She half-expected to see the woman in white when she opened them, for the view before her was grounded, without the faded edges and inconsistencies of a dream, but from this angle the resemblance was unmistakable. But this was reality, and the woman in white was confined to her imagination.

But if this place was real, perhaps so too was whatever the woman in white wanted her to find.

The heavens opened as she returned to the path, drenching her in deja vu as she searched for the recess and its stairs in something like a trance. Though Qin Su was looking carefully, she nearly walked right past, some instinct telling her to look twice, and there it was.

The stone was too slippery to grip, but Qin Su leapt from step to step using her sword for balance. At the top, the sheer wall looked unremarkable, unmarked save for a crack running vertically. She followed the line with her eyes. Up, across, and down.

Ah.

She set her hands to stone, heedless of the damp and flaking lichen, searching for a lever, a mechanism, anything. After a moment, her thumb found a depression, and pressure hissed in release, the hidden door swinging open.

The space within was crypt-like, carved into the rock with just enough space on either side of a bed, talismans on the walls to keep out the damp.  Qin Su had thought the woman in white might be leading her to herself, but this was something else entirely, and Qin Su did not know what to make of it.

For there was a man laid out on the bed, so still despite the noise of her entry that Qin Su thought at first that he was dead, beautiful enough that he could have been a statue. But his chest rose and fell under crossed arms.

Yet it was not the unconscious man in a hidden room that held her attention, but a portrait hanging over the bed. The woman from her dreams, painted not in white but in Jiang purple and pink, and younger, with flowers in her hair. There was a beatific smile on her lips, belonging to a girl whose heart had never been broken.

“How did you get in here?” Jiang Wanyin hissed, and she turned to find him standing on the ledge in the rain, his fists clenched and face the same shade of deep purple as his robes.

“A dream led me here, and the door was unlocked.” Qin Su’s entirely truthful explanation served only to make Jiang Wanyin growl like a dog and lunge toward her threateningly, stopping when she backed into the bed.

Throwing up his hands, Jiang Wanyin paced back and forth in the small space like a caged animal. “Jin Guangyao sent you to spy on me, didn’t he? I knew he never believed me that Wei Wuxian wasn’t here. Well, you can tell him that I didn’t lie — he isn’t here. His body may have healed from what should have been several fatal injuries, but his spirit is long gone. It isn’t coming back. His golden core isn’t even there. He’s not a threat, and Jin Guangyao needs to leave me the fuck alone.”

This was the infamous Yiling Laozu? The portraits still in circulation today were truly slander. “If my husband sent me here with an ulterior motive, he didn’t tell me. I have no quarrel with you keeping the mortal remains of your brother to mourn.”

“He isn’t my bro—” Jiang Wanyin broke off, reconsidering — something. “You’re being oddly calm about finding the body of the Yiling Laozu.”

“Nothing is attacking me. Should I be afraid? Angry?”

Confusion broke through his mask of suspicion, making him look very young. “Yes?”

Qin Su shrugged. “My father-in-law feared this man, but my father-in-law was power hungry and believed everyone was like him. The Yiling Laozu did not send my husband a bloody doll to threaten my son, so forgive me if I have more relevant concerns.” She pointed to the portrait. “Is that Jiang Yanli?”

“Obviously. His work,” Jiang Cheng gestured at the body. It showed in the brush strokes that the Yiling Laozu had been a talented artist, and that once, he had truly loved the Jiang siblings.

“I never had the pleasure of meeting your sister, or Wei Wuxian,” Qin Su told him. “I was barely of age during the Sunshot Campaign. My father kept me back to defend our lands while he and my siblings joined the final push to Nightless City. We had a few incursions, but little damage — save that my brother was killed by one of Wen Ruohan’s monsters, and my sister became heir. I was needed at home to help Xifeng adjust to the responsibility.”

“I have wondered how one of our generation could be so innocent as you appear. Appeared,” he corrected himself, eyes beginning to narrow again, though her attempts to disarm him with words had seemed to be working.

“I have often wondered how a sect leader can be as ill-mannered as Jiang-zongzhu, but my manners are too refined to ask in public.”

To her surprise, Jiang Wanyin laughed. “A-Jie would have liked you. She, too, had impeccable manners. Until someone insulted me… or him.”

“Being level-headed and polite is a skill,” she informed him.

“One I don’t have,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Are you going to tell me how you really found this place?”

When he looked at the Yiling Laozu’s body, and his sister’s portrait, it was clear that his grief for both of them had not even begun to diminish over the years. Perhaps that was the problem Jiang Yanli wished her to solve. An impossible challenge. She watched the slow rise and fall of the Yiling Laozu’s chest. Or perhaps, Jiang Yanli wanted something entirely different.

“I told you the truth — a dream,” Qin Su said, though she could now be certain that it was far more. “If my suspicions are correct, I may have a more satisfactory explanation for you tomorrow.”

 

Jiang Wanyin reluctantly agreed.

It was not as if he could imprison the wife of the chief cultivator until she gave him satisfactory answers, not for breaking into a room that wasn’t supposed to exist. Nor could he ask for her messenger butterfly talismans and be certain she had no more hidden away. And so, she returned to dine with her son and converse with her attendants as if it were an ordinary evening.

It took longer that night for Qin Su to fall asleep, the rapid beating of her heart keeping her awake. What felt like hours after she had closed her eyes, she finally entered the dream. The woman in white was waiting for her, her skirts hiked up to pool around her thighs as her feet dangled in the water.

“Jiang Yanli?” Qin Su asked quickly, afraid she might worry herself back to the waking world if she waited. “Your name is Jiang Yanli, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s me,” Jiang Yanli said, her voice rough with disuse and breathless with wonder.  “Do I know you? It’s so hard to remember.”

Chapter 2

Do I know you? Jiang Yanli asked, and it felt like the answer should be yes. “My name is Qin Su. I don’t know you, but I hold the title that should have been yours, much good it’s done me, and I am one of those raising your son.”

“I know,” Jiang Yanli laughed, a smile much like the one in her portrait splitting her face, but this smile belonged to one who had seen too much of the evils of the world and had not let it break her. “As you said it, I … you named me, and everything is coming back. It’s all jumbled together, not in any helpful order.”

“Is that why you chose me? Because of Jin Ling?”

“I wasn’t thinking in any conscious way before I found you, and barely until you recognized me. You were nearby and — and instinct told me that you were a kindred spirit, that you could and would help me.” The earnest, wide-eyed way Jiang Yanli looked at her made Qin Su wonder how there hadn’t been an army willing to fight and die to protect her.

“Nearby? But you were at Nightless City when —”

“When I died?” Jiang Yanli’s mouth twisted wryly without the shock or sadness Qin Su might have expected. “The feeling of a sword piercing me when I jumped in front of A-Xian was the first thing I remembered. And then there was this strange warmth, and a flash of red light, like a spell, then nothing for a very long time. Until here, and you.”

“Six years,” Qin Su said, her voice low and mournful, where Jiang Yanli seemed unable to allow hers to be.

“Six years, and my son growing up without me, or A-Xuan. Tell me, was it for nothing?” Even then, her voice was bright, ringing false, like it was an obligation for her to be just fine in the face of disaster, doing nothing.

Qin Su hesitated and saw Jiang Yanli assuming the worst. “Wei Wuxian is well, breathing, but he hasn’t woken in those six years.”

“Oh, didi,” Jiang Yanli sighed.

“You led me to him last night,” Qin Su said slowly.

Jiang Yanli’s eyes widened, and she blinked.

She hadn’t known. To her own admission, conscious thought hadn’t played a part in her actions before tonight, and yet she had been drawn to what remained of Wei Wuxian. There was a connection there, the magical kind, not just the love of a sister for a man she considered her little brother.

“He’s in a hidden room in the cliffs, just there.” Qin Su pointed in the direction of the recess. “Jiang Wanyin keeps him there as a memorial to both of you.”

“Oh, didi,” Jiang Yanli sighed again, this time meaning another man.

That red light Jiang Yanli remembered, combined with Wei Wuxian’s missing soul, and her connection to his body. It was the vaguest of unlikely theories, but — “Will you entertain an odd request? May I see your hand?”

“You may.” Jiang Yanli offered one up, as if for a kiss, and Qin Su took it, turning it palm up, her thumb sliding over Jiang Yanli’s wrist.

A pulse beat there, strong and steady.

 

“Your sister has been appearing in my dreams since before I came here,” Qin Su said, and Jiang Wanyin sprung to his feet, refusing to stop pacing as she tried to explain what she believed she had learned from Jiang Yanli. “She couldn’t speak before, but I named her and … is it possible that Wei Wuxian cast a spell on both of them? And Jiang Yanli is out there somewhere, sleeping like him?”

“No, no, I saw her die — but Wei Wuxian wanted to die at the end. He should be dead. He fell off a cliff, and he’s still breathing. I went to her funeral.” The difference between Jiang Wanyin, sect leader, and Jiang Wanyin, man, had never been more striking, a far sight from the man who held himself steady under the watchful eyes of allies, enemies, and rivals alike.

“Jin Guangshan collected anything of the Yiling Laozu’s work that he could get his hands on,” Qin Su explained, speaking slowly, as if approaching an injured tiger. “He had this awful man — Xue Yang, the disciple my husband expelled when he learned of his history shortly after becoming sect leader — conducting experiments, trying to replicate the Tiger Amulet. Is it really so unlikely that he might hide away the Yiling Laozu’s final miracle?”

Those experiments had begun when she and Jin Guangyao were still courting, and he, on occasion, confided in her. Like that his father had pressured him to be involved in the research. To what extent? How had delving into resentment affected him? Who was conducting the experiments now that continued to occasionally churn out groundbreaking talismans from the Yiling Laozu’s work, even if his father’s pet project had long been discarded, and was it Mo Xuanyu? Something had always kept her from asking.

Qin Su now suspected those confidences had barely scraped the surface, and his heart had always been hidden deep away and out of her — or anyone’s — reach.

“Jin-furen, Jin Guangyao was there when we initially arrested Xue Yang for the massacre of the Yueyang Chang clan.” Jiang Wanyin latched onto the smallest detail rather than consider the possibility of her question and threw her into turmoil.

Why had her husband lied? Jin Guangyao could have simply claimed to have been afraid to disobey his father. It was not as if Qin Su had not known who Jin Guangshan was. Unless Jin Guangyao had been more involved than he claimed, and he was hiding worse than the protection of a murderer.

Qin Su had married a man with lofty goals. She had admired his drive and believed in his vision for reform. It was half of why she had married him. She had also seen him push forward with his plans despite explicit threats without warning his wife, only thinking to safeguard his own son when she independently mentioned a trip.

“I see,” she said less steadily than she would have preferred. “In any case, your sister is not a ghost, or merely the impression of a memory. The manifestations are all wrong. Not to mention, if she received the soul calming ceremony, impossible.”

“And your conclusion is that she must be alive? Sleeping away the years? Do you have any idea what it would do to me if you’re wrong?” Jiang Wanyin demanded.

“I lost my brother, too.” The man who always snuck her dragon’s beard candy when he returned from night hunts, right up until the last before the war, when she was nearly grown. Who taught her how to hold a brush and a sword better than any of her teachers. 

Jiang Wanyin grimaced, having forgotten. “And she chose you because what, you were convenient?

“She said that I was nearby, but she also said we were kindred spirits.” Those words held a mystery and a secret Qin Su was not yet capable of understanding, but Jiang Wanyin’s stormy expression only deepened, and its meaning dawned on her. Jealousy, his sister had chosen a stranger, if without noticing. “Has Wei Wuxian been in your dreams?”

“No, no he hasn’t,” he said darkly. “Wei Wuxian already had what he would call a kindred spirit. It could only be — ugh.”

“Ugh?” she repeated, raising a brow.

“Wei Wuxian was loyal to me until his godsdamned bleeding heart led him astray,” Jiang Wanyin complained. “But he was obsessed with that holier-than-thou blank wall Lan Wangji from the first time they met. Inexplicably, the obsession was mutual.”

“Hanguang-jun? Really.” What a fascinating development. Her sister’s adolescent self — before she was happily married to one of Laoling Qin’s outer disciples, who adored her — would have been devastated. “I was always told they hated each other.”

“If only,” Jiang Wanyin grumbled. “If he’s with him — the man probably doesn’t even think his dreams are unusual. I’ll send Hanguang-jun a butterfly. He hates me as much as I despise him, but he’ll come if it’s about Wei Wuxian.”

 

They received word before the day was out that Lan Wangji would arrive by sword in two days.

 

“My husband was a fool, and I loved him for it,” Jiang Yanli told her under a sun so bright it flattened the horizon. “He insisted on digging a lotus pond himself to make me feel more at home, though he’d never gardened before in his life. Then, I knew I would have to give him a second chance and accept his offer of marriage, though we’d both rejected each other in our youth. I took him back to my rooms right then and I don’t think he fully realized my intentions until I was naked in his lap.”

“Oh my.” Envy churned in her belly, but it didn’t feel like it was over a man who delivered on his proclamations of love.

“Is that so shocking? You’re married.” Jiang Yanli had this wide-eyed expression that invited Qin Su to tell her everything she knew.

“Barely.” This might be a dream, and it might be common knowledge, but she had never before admitted the emptiness of her marriage so plainly. “You see, my husband got me pregnant out of wedlock and decided that he didn’t want me anymore on our wedding night.”

“Oh.” Jiang Yanli’s sun-warmed fingers cupped her jaw and tilted Qin Su’s face up to meet her eyes. “That can’t be right,” she muttered, looking not at the roundness of Qin Su’s cheeks, or the tears threatening to fall despite the fact that she had moved on with her life, but at her —

Jiang Yanli’s touch burned red hot, and Qin Su pulled away. “I assure you, it’s exactly what happened. He convinced me to love him, and lost interest once he had me. I’m hardly the first woman this has happened to, though I think the husbands usually take more mistresses.”

An immense, drowning sympathy was contained in Jiang Yanli’s eyes. “Do you love him still?”

“How could I? I don’t know him.” Somehow, Qin Su’s hands had wandered into Jiang Yanli’s grasp. Qin Su let them turn, intertwining their fingers. It felt more natural than should be possible, and she grasped for a subject change “I think I know how you’re here.”

“Tell me when you’re certain.” It would have been impossible to say no to Jiang Yanli’s blinding smile, so she didn’t try.

Another night, then. This one Qin Su would spend learning of Jiang Yanli’s favorite things, how cooking for those she loved was calming, and made her feel like she was making something with her hands when the traditional pursuits of a cultivator were impossible with her health. How she secretly hated the feeling of lake water drying on her hair and always pinned it up when she swam, trying to keep her head above water. Qin Su told her in turn how much she had once loved poetry and painting, but though she could now sponsor artists, there was no room in her life to create or appreciate it. Of how Jin Ling had brought them to Yunmeng by tempting her son with deceptively named creatures.

 Their problems could wait for the sunrise.

 

“Have you been dreaming of Wei Wuxian?” Jiang Cheng blurted out the moment he, Qin Su, and Lan Wangji were alone in Lotus Pier’s banquet hall.

Predictably, Lan Wangji bristled, taking offense that was frankly warranted without the context. “That is a highly inappropriate question. I will take my leave.”

Qin Su sighed. If the enmity between the Yiling Laozu and Hanguang-jun had been greatly exaggerated, then that between Hanguang-jun and Sandu Shengshou was vastly underreported.  “Despite Jiang-zongzhu’s lack of tact, his question is not so prying as it might be under other circumstances. You see, Jiang-zongzhu has a theory that you may be experiencing dreams that are more than dreams — as I am, of Jiang Yanli.”

 Lan Wangji hesitated in his dramatic sweep toward the door and though he was ever graceful and poised, there was something vulnerable in the way he said, “As you are?”

He knelt when she asked him to sit but did not touch the tea that had been prepared for them after Qin Su poured it — taking on the role that should have been their host’s, with both men competing to outshine the other in passive aggressive hatred — and listened to her explanation.

No sooner had she described what lay hidden in the cliff chamber, than Lan Wangji leaped to his feet and demanded, no, shouted, “Wei Ying is alive, and you kept it secret for all these years, pretending to hunt him down?”

“What, I should have told you so you could steal him again, leaving me nothing to mourn?” Jiang Wanyin hissed. “He’s as good as fucking dead and I’ve been looking for his soul in every upstart demonic cultivator for years. What the hell have you been doing?”

“I,” Lan Wangji said with all the warmth of a blizzard, “have been living a life Wei Ying would be proud of.”

“You —” Jiang Wanyin nearly launched himself across the table before Qin Su slammed her empty teacup down on the table.

“Gentlemen, please,” she said in the tone she had developed specifically to make Sect Leaders Yao and Ouyang shut up.  Jiang Wanyin sat back on his heels, looking confused as to why he had done so. Lan Wangji’s mask of inscrutability fell back into place, though Qin Su did not think she would forget that so much emotion was buried beneath it. “Thank you. So, as you see, if Jiang Yanli’ spirit has truly found mine, Jiang Zongzhu suggested Wei Wuxian might have found yours.”

“That is impossible.” Lan Wangji seemed to vibrate at the mere suggestion. “The real Wei Ying would never —”

“So, you have been dreaming of him.” Jiang Wanyin’s lower lip curled, in distaste or jealousy or both. “And Wei Wuxian would never what? Tell you he loves you and other gross, sappy things?”

“Er.” Lan Wangji hesitated for such a long time, his ears flushing a brilliant red that spread into his cheeks, that Qin Su suspected more than loving words had occurred. “Yes.”

“Please,” Jiang Wanyin scoffed. “Of course he would. There’s the confirmation you needed, Jin-furen. I’m going to see my nephew and cool off until I’m less in the mood to put a fist through Lan-er-gongzi’s skull.”

He swept off.

What was it about the great sects that made their scions so dramatic? “Perhaps the remainder of this conversation will be easier without him,” she suggested.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji said.

“When did the dreams start?” Qin Su asked.

“They did not so much start, as change about three years ago. I was having a nightmare of the night I lost —” Lan Wangji cut off, swallowing heavily.

She hazarded a guess. “The night you lost him?”

“Yes. I was watching, powerless, as Wei Ying slipped from my grasp, as I had many times before, when I heard his voice behind me, calling my name. When I turned around, we were somewhere else, and I have not had a nightmare since.”

“You’re fully aware in these dreams, able to converse with him and feel almost as clearly as in the waking world?”

“Yes, though I had assumed he was a wishful fabrication of my mind. I am not yet convinced otherwise.”

As she had expected, save for one inconsistency. “But you didn’t have to name him first?”

“I was screaming his name when he first appeared,” Lan Wangji admitted. “— if indeed he did.”

“I understand your hesitation,” she said. “If I’m wrong and you get your hopes up — of course you would wish to protect her heart. However, would you be willing to try something? Ask him tonight about Jiang Yanli, and if he cast a spell?”

In this, Lan Wangji did not hesitate, merely stared at her with the intensity that was said to have made an entire gang of highwaymen flee. “For even the smallest possibility of seeing Wei Ying again under the sunlight, I would do anything.”

 

A-Song pulled Qin Su into the courtyard where breakfast was served under shaded awnings, and came to a sudden stop, his grip on her hand tightening. Qin Su stopped short alongside him, and Bai Lin managed to avoid stepping on Qin Su’s heels only for Fan Xinyi to bump into her. Their ensuing bickering did not distract from the cause of her son’s sudden apprehension: the raw emotion engraved across Lan Wangji’s legendarily marble face, somewhere between shock and a stunned, hesitant hope. Though the disciples of Lotus Pier kept their distance, they seemed unbothered.

“Lin-ah,” Qin Su said, her eyes not moving from Lan Wangji. “I think A-Song deserves a breakfast treat at the city market, don’t you?”

“After how he trampled our belongings?” A-Song had spent the evening before pretending to be a dog. “Oh, yes, I do agree. Come along, xiao-gongzi, and my dear, clumsy friend.”

Qin Su kissed her son goodbye on the forehead and unwisely promised him another treat if he behaved.

When A-Song’s chattering about the dumplings he wanted was muffled behind a thick door and fading, Lan Wangji said, “I would like to see him.”

There was no question of who he was. That Lan Wangji asked now when he hadn’t before — did it mean the Wei Wuxian in his dreams had confirmed her theory? “And I seemed more likely to show you than a certain sect leader?”

He merely blinked at her in response.

“You’d be right,” she said, as if he’d answered.

 

 Qin Su resisted the urge to pressure Lan Wangji though he remained silent long after Lotus Pier was out of sight. Presumably, he would share if he had information she needed to know. She hoped.

It might have qualified as a companionable silence if Qin Su hadn’t been bursting at the seams with curiosity. Though many of the loudest voices of the Sunshot generation would have been railing about his rudeness, Qin Su did not get the impression his silence came from any feelings of superiority. Lan Wangji was merely quiet. The quiet made it obvious when a stick cracked underfoot from somewhere behind them more than once along the way, someone following with all the subtlety of an elephant carrying a load of loosely secured bricks.

He spoke not a word until he was kneeling over the shell of Wei Wuxian’s body, his hand pressed to his lips. “Wei Ying cannot wake until Jiang Yanli does.”

“Cannot or will not?” She had to ask.

“He says cannot. The spell is tied to her life, not his.” Lan Wangji said without taking his eyes from Wei Wuxian’s motionless face. “Wei Ying cast a spell in his last moments, intending to use his own life as fuel to heal Jiang Yanli, and did not expect to be caught in it, their healing and waking linked together.”

“He really didn’t know?” she asked.

“Wei Ying invented the spell half-dead and more than half-mad on the battlefield at Nightless City. How would he know the effects?” Lan Wangji was so passionate in his defense of Wei Wuxian’s brilliance that it was difficult to imagine how the world had been convinced there was rivalry, rather than romance between them for so many years.

“And you believe he just can’t wake up?” Jiang Wanyin demanded from the door. This time, Qin Su had been expecting him. “How many times has he lied? Maybe he wants to stay in your head forever.”

“I believe him.” Lan Wangji said firmly, managing to insult Jiang Wanyin’s intelligence with only his tone. “There are reasons he would wish to return.”

“Yeah, he can’t wait to marry you,” Jiang Wanyin scoffed. “Forgive me if I don’t take the word of a man who should have run off to join an acting troupe because he’s a far better liar than he was a friend.”

“I am not his only reason. But when he wakes, Wei Ying hopes you will attend our wedding. Do not disappoint him” As Jiang Wanyin sputtered in indignation, Lan Wangji shifted his gaze to Qin Su, revealing that his eyes were not so much flat as hiding amusement. A vast difference between the man of yesterday, resigned to living as best he could without his heart, and one who believed he could regain him.  “Wei Ying can feel approximately where Jiang Yanli’s body rests. She is in Lanling, somewhere dark, but the precise location is hidden from him.”

“You suspect my husband?” It was less of a shock than it might have been, the logical assumption given Jiang Wanyin’s revelations of Jin Guangyao’s association with Xue Yang, but she still did not want it to be true.

Lan Wangji inclined his head. “It may not be wise to approach Jin Guangyao directly.”

“I rarely approach him at all,” she said wryly. “I believe I know where —or with whom — to begin.”

With skittering shadows and an adolescent boy who was all too eager to please.

Jiang Wanyin cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to the matter at hand. “Even if you find her, does the Wei Wuxian playing house in Lan-er-gongzi’s head know how to break his spell?”

“He does,” The length of Lan Wangji’s pause after saying this, and the way he did not quite look at Jiang Wanyin, led Qin Su to a realization. Despite Lan Wangji’s apparent composure, these were both deeply dramatic men, deeply petty in their mutual disdain. “When you find Jiang Yanli’s body, Jin-furen, you will wake her with a kiss.”

“Oh,” Qin Su felt her face heating. Someone made a choking noise, but she was ninety percent certain that was Jiang Wanyin.

“Once she has woken, I will wake Wei Ying.”

Jiang Wanyin grumbled something about being relieved now that Wei Wuxian wasn’t haunting him, because that would be gross, and only Wei Wuxian would invent a spell with a romantic solution in his dying moments.

It was not an unappealing thought, if Jiang Yanli were a willing participant, but romantic?

Qin Su wasn’t that lucky.

 

 

“You have to kiss me?” Jiang Yanli laughed in response to Qin Su’s earnest explanation that it was necessary to wake her from her enchanted sleep. “Is that such a trial?”

Qin Su wished she could blame the reddening of her face on the sun, but it was merely warm without burning here in Jiang Yanli’s dream. “I thought it might be difficult for you, since your husband...”

Jiang Yanli kicked her foot through the water, sending up a spray of droplets that spattered their skirts and faces only to quickly disappear. “I love A-Xuan, and I will miss him until we’re reunited in another life. That doesn’t mean I don’t wish to live. I missed my son’s first words and first steps, teaching him to read and to swim. I don’t want to miss seeing him grow into a man. I want to hug my brothers and taste freshly picked lotus seeds and feel the satisfaction of a new dish turning out exactly as I imagined. I want to be surprised by rain on a sunny day, because the weather doesn’t do what I tell it, and take too long to decide between ribbons in slightly different shades of pink at the market. And you’re telling me all I need to do is let a beautiful woman kiss me? How terrible.”

Had Qin Su ever been so affected by a compliment? Whatever Jin Zixuan had once said —and Jin Zixuan had realized his error and pursued her— Jiang Yanli was the beauty of their generation, her looks complimented by her warmth and wide, easy smile. She thought Qin Su beautiful?

“You don’t need more time to mourn him?” Qin Su’s own grief—her mother, her brother—may have settled with time, but they still hurt whenever she prodded the wounds in her heart their loss had created. Six years may have passed for the world since the death of Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Yanli had been aware for so little of it.

“I can say with certainty that my A-Xuan would not want his memory to hold me back. There isn’t a time limit on grief, but I don’t need coarse linen to honor my husband’s memory.“ Jiang Yanli’s mourning robes melted into purple silk in a wave from collar to hem. “And you? You are a married woman with a living husband.”

“In name only,” Qin Su reminded her. If Jin Guangyao had ever been unfaithful—in body, emotional affair with Lan Xichen notwithstanding—he had been discrete. She wasn’t certain how bound she felt by a marriage that was technically unconsummated, but it had previously been an irrelevant point. “Though I’ve never been tempted into unfaithfulness before, by a woman in my dreams or otherwise. My lack of experience might be the trial.”

“You’ll be waking me from a sleeping spell, not courting me,” Jiang Yanli said, and Qin Su’s gut lurched, though she had no reason to be disappointed. “Besides, A-Xuan flailed like a fish out of water during our first kiss, and I still married him. He learned. You can’t be that bad.”

Qin Su raised a hand to cover her mouth, but Jiang Yanli grabbed hold of it, exposing her helpless giggling. “You never know,” she said. “I might be.”

“There’s an easy way to find out.” Jiang Yanli reeled her in like she was the catch of the day, but then her hand was on Qin Su’s jaw, and she was leaning in. Her breath caught and held as she waited for Jiang Yanli to close the final distance between them.

But Jiang Yanli hummed, drawing back just before their lips would have touched. “No, I’m certain kissing you will not be a trial.”

 

— And Qin Su woke in the early morning hours flushed from head to toe with an ache between her thighs. No matter how she tried, she could not find her way back to dreaming.

She told herself it was the heat.

 

Qin Su returned to Lanling without her son, and with only Fan Xinyi, who of her attendants had the better stamina flying by sword, to guard her. Halfway through the journey a butterfly talisman came looking for her, carrying with it an excuse for her early return.  She was needed, but under no circumstances should she bring Jin Rusong or Jin Rulan back with her. There had been an attempt to assassinate the Chief Cultivator by poisoning. Jin Guangyao would live but was convalescing.

As she approached Jinlintai, Qin Su was met mid-air by disciples acting as her husband’s guards and escorted directly to his side. The sect remained on high alert, though the disciples informed her that a hundred of their compatriots had been sent to ensure the culprit, the leader of a minor set who opposed the watchtower project, could never move against Lanling again. Within a day, a particularly bloodthirsty young man crowed, the clan would be extinct.

Qin Su swallowed down her objections. She would have advised against vengeance and advocated justice, a trial for the one responsible. Presumably this was why she had not been consulted.

Easing open the door to her erstwhile husband’s chambers, she found him wan and pale in his bed. At the sight of her, he struggled to his feet and took her hands in his.

“A-Su,” he said with the earnest rawness Qin Su could no longer believe was real, though there was no more discernible hint of a lie now than there had been the day he asked her to marry him. “A-Su, they tried to kill our son.”

“Someone found out where he is? Then why did you call me back —”

“No, no.” He shook his head, his grip unusually weak when he squeezed her hands. “To prevent anyone looking for A-Song, I hired a boy as a decoy.”

She stiffened. “A decoy?

“Since the doll targeted A-Song, I thought it would be prudent. To my regret, I was correct. There was a higher dose in the food meant for A-Song than in mine.” He shivered and a strange wet noise came from his throat. “He passed within minutes. I’m so thankful you thought to take that trip. My intelligence pointed to a knife in the dark at the hands of a different man.  I didn’t expect — It could have been A-Song.”

“I see.” Qin Su pulled her hands out of his grasp, and Jin Guangyao stumbled into her. He truly was weak from the poisoning, his eyes dazed. Not seeming to realize she’d recoiled, he even rested his chin on her shoulder for a moment, closer than they’d been since before the wedding. “Please, fujun. Lie down. You need to conserve your strength and recover. Do not concern yourself with sect matters, I will handle everything.”

She eased him down to the mattress and he fell against the sheets, his eyes already closing. “I know A-Su will keep us running well.”

After pulling up the covers, she left him there, heart and mind racing. Jin Guangyao had purposefully placed a child in danger; that child was now dead. Lan Wangji was right. She had married a dangerous, cold-hearted man. Whatever remaining belief Qin Su had possessed in her husband was thoroughly, irrevocably shattered.

But Jin Guangyao’s infirmity created an opportunity she was not likely to have again: the chance to search while his seemingly omnipresent eyes were closed.

Chapter 3

A hand poked up out of the knee-high meadow grasses, plucking the petals from a dandelion. Qin Su waded off of the path until she could see Mo Xuanyu lying on his back and staring at the sky, a discarded book at his side. Picking up the book, Qin Su examined the title. A History of the Most Terrible Demonic Practitioners and their Downfall. This version had been published five years ago, updated to include the Yiling Laozu. “Researching in preparation for the next great evil?”

Mo Xuanyu jerked into a seated position. “Saozi! You’re back! But I swear I’m not missing—”

“Relax, Xuanyu,” she said. Under other circumstances, where she was not married to a man who had endangered a child intentionally, fatally, and without regret, she would have laughed. “You’re not in trouble. In fact, I need your help.”

Shrewd calculation took over his face, and he bit his lip. “If I help you does that mean I’ll never have to attend sword class again?”

“Martial training is critical for any cultivator,” she informed him firmly. “But I can arrange private lessons with a patient teacher—a handsome one, as well as to make up for the ones I promised, and missed.”

“I understand why you left. That poor kid. I don’t understand it. He was an orphan, and so are we…” He trailed off. “Did you know?

“I knew there was a threat to my A-Song, but not what my husband intended to do to counter it.”

He nodded, considering. “What is it you need help with?”

“First, you must promise not to tell Jin Guangyao that I came to you for anything other than your lessons.” Qin Su said, and he hesitated before nodding. Could she trust his word? From the green-gray tinge of Mo Xuanyu’s expression, the death of that unnamed boy was still fresh on his mind. From what she knew of his history, Mo Xuanyu could easily have been that child. Anyone’s faith would be shaken. And she had to take the risk—if anyone in Jinlintai knew a fraction of Jin Guangyao’s secrets, it was Mo Xuanyu. “Then I’ll put my trust in you. Somewhere near to here, I believe—I know—there is a woman being kept in secret. Is there a chance you know what I’m talking about?

Mo Xuanyu looked at the tattered remains of his dandelion and threw it off the path. A new determination was in his eyes when he stood. “I can take you there.”

 

There was more than one woman locked away in Jinlintai.

Down the slope from Jinlintai, on the edge of a forest that had once hosted an infamous crowd hunt, stood a one-room house shaded by a plum tree and inhabited by a woman who belonged to the past. A large pile of embroidered fans stacked in one corner of the porch had seen better days, clearly left to the elements. The woman sat on the porch embroidering a new fan with an absentminded look on her long face. Awake, aware, fussing with her tangled threads, this was not Jiang Yanli. This was a woman out of Qin Su’s history, a woman she had known all her life, and who had never chosen her dreams to haunt.

Qin Su was carelessly loud in her shock when she called out the name of her mother’s former maid, last seen sobbing over her mistress’ body. Bicao had left without quitting her position or claiming her final salary. Or perhaps not, from the way a barrier flashed when she stepped toward the edge of the porch. Bicao clutched the robes over her heart and bid Qin Su not to join her, or she might be imprisoned herself, but dissembled when asked how she had come to be here. She had sworn never to speak the secrets she and Jin Guangyao alone knew aloud. Yet when Mo Xuanyu offered to free her, Qin Su saw the hunger in her eyes for anything but days of frozen monotony.

Needing to know, unable to predict how much she didn’t want to, Qin Su cut a deal.

Only a few moments later, Bicao departed with a purse full of coin and Qin Su sat down hard in the dirt, watching her retreating back.

 

Well after returning to her rooms, Qin Su was unsettled. Repulsed. Nauseated on a level not even pregnancy had matched. How that pregnancy had occurred tore a jagged hole through her chest; etched itself, unwanted behind her eyelids.

Siblings. Her mother had told Jin Guangyao the truth and it had been too little, too late. She had told her maid. But not her own daughter. Never her own daughter. It had been decided that Qin Su should be confined to a life of loneliness and haunting questions as if she were an infant, incapable of handling a terrible truth. Perhaps her mother had acted out of some misguided attempt to protect Qin Su, when she was the one wasting away. Perhaps the pain had worsened with time, the years of internalization making her believe nothing was more important than hiding. Perhaps, though she could not bring herself to live with it, she had believed condemning Qin Su to marry her brother was preferable to scandal.

Jin Guangyao had certainly thought so.

Qin Su choked down bile; found it rising again.

“I uh, I take it that wasn’t who or what you were looking for?” Mo Xuanyu said. She had momentarily forgotten he was there.

“Please give me a moment,” she managed, before rushing behind the folding screen to the chamber pot. It provided little relief, her stomach already near-empty. Outside, she heard Fan Xinyi asking Mo Xuanyu what was wrong in a hushed voice. Fan Xinyi had stayed behind on her orders, without explanation, to make excuses for her absence. When Fan Xinyi asked if she needed anything, Qin Su called back that she didn’t, Fan Xinyi should return outside to stand guard, the sound weak and unconvincing.

The years she’d spent ensuring she was a respectable sect leader’s wife, holding everyone around her at the length of her position, and all for a sham. She wanted someone to hold her, but still, she couldn’t say it. Not to a woman she paid to attend her, and certainly not to the boy who had just learned she was not Saozi, but Jiejie.

But no, she didn’t want just anyone. She wanted Jiang Yanli to hold her.

She washed out the taste in her mouth with wine, splashed water from a nearby pitcher on her face. Stepping out from behind the screen with her hands behind her back, at her full, diminutive height, she addressed Mo Xuanyu. “Jin Guangyao has more secrets. Will you help me uncover the most important one?”

He, too, looked squeamish. “I’m not sure I can handle it if it’s anything like the last.”

There were untold skeletons in Jin Guangyao’s closet, and Qin Su would bury him in them. But she shook her head. “I wasn’t expecting who or what we found. The woman I’m looking for remains missing. She’s been under a sleeping spell meant to heal her for years. Taken back in a deathly injured state from the battle of Nightless City, in fact. You would be helping me save her.”

Mo Xuanyu’s eyes went wide. “You can’t mean…”

Qin Su hesitated over whether to fill in the blank, but he didn’t seem to notice her lack of answer. He nodded jerkily, emphatically.

“There are places Yao-ge—” Mo Xuanyu went, briefly, as green-tinged as she still felt. “—Jin Guangyao has told me never to go. I’ve always admired him too much to disobey, but I did, well, I did study the warding talismans. Out of curiosity. I believe I can break them, given a few hours.”

Qin Su could hold herself together that long.

 

He took the night.

 

It took a sleeping tonic was for Qin Su to fall asleep. Unsure if it might send her into a state too dreamless to reach the one person she wanted and needed, she took a low dose. She couldn’t be certain how long she lay there, curled up around her aching belly before the world tilted, and sent her falling away from the horrors of her reality.

Her feet hit the dock and she stumbled. Not into Jiang Yanli’s arms as she might have wished, but into the water. She sank, for a moment into cool, dark surrounds before bobbing up to surface, sputtering.

She considered lying back, letting the contrast of warm sun above and cold water below send her drifting out of reality. Perhaps this dream world created to preserve the mind of a woman injured to the point of death could do that, if she asked it. But no. Nothing could minimize the sickening, terrible truth of her incestuous marriage.

And Qin Su would not leave Jiang Yanli trapped here, where no one else could reach her.

She took the hand Jiang Yanli offered, and scrambled up onto the dock, but stayed a wet, miserable mess on her knees.

Jiang Yanli took a long look at her face, and sat down beside her, despite the damp puddle staining the wood and wrapped Qin Su in her arms. Her hugs were as tight and warm as Qin Su could have hoped for, and when Qin Su shivered, the water vanished. Though Qin Su’s tears dampened Jiang Yanli’s robes in the lake water’s place, she did not wish them away.

“Rough day?” Jiang Yanli finally asked. It startled a laugh out of Qin Su.

“An understatement. Never in a million years would I have suspected…” The whole sordid truth spilled out of her, as Jiang Yanli listened, holding her close, an anchor without judgment. “I would have survived the scandal. My father, my real father, who raised me, would never have cast me out. I could have eloped with a disciple from my father’s sect, or…” There were other avenues she would have contemplated before A-Song was real and alive and beloved. “Jin Guangyao’s position wouldn’t have survived a broken engagement, and so he decided to cage me.”

“You’ll survive him now.” Jiang Yanli pulled back just far enough to place her hands on Qin Su’s cheeks and steer her eyes to meet her own.

Qin Su could almost see a future in their depths. “You sound so certain.”

“You need to be careful. Jin Guangyao is a snake — don’t let yourself be alone with him anymore.” Qin Su shuddered at the thought. “But you are stronger than he will ever be. You will outlast him; I expect to see you happy on the other side.”

Jiang Yanli would make her happy, Qin Su realized. But a willingness to kiss her to break a curse didn’t mean Jiang Yanli wanted her.

“I have to find you first.” If Mo Xuanyu couldn’t get through those wards, perhaps Lan Wangji could carry copies of the talismans to Wei Wuxian in his dreams. But there was no guarantee he could solve them before Jin Guangyao was back to his usual self, or that Jiang Yanli wasn’t somewhere else entirely.

But Jiang Yanli merely smiled. “You will.”

“You have a great deal of faith in someone you met in a dream.” Qin Su would not have selected herself. She didn’t know enough of what was happening under her own nose to handle this alone. All she had done was listen.

“I know you. My subconscious has excellent taste in rescuers.” If Jiang Yanli, sun shrouded and beautiful, believed it, Qin Su would have to try.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were—”

 

—Flirting.

Qin Su woke, disoriented by the shift from bright sunlight to pitch black night. The sounds of a scuffle came through her door, someone trying to press forward and Xinyi, stronger, trying not to hurt the intruder as she held them back. No real danger, then.

 “Gongzi, you can’t go in there alone—”

“It’s urgent, didn’t Jie say I might come by?”

She hadn’t. Qin Su ran a hand over her bleary eyes, the beginnings of a headache pulsing in her temples. She was dehydrated, and her blood pressure was low, but even so, she did feel better for her conversation with Jiang Yanli. She levered herself to her feet with a groan and opened the door to the outer chamber, where Mo Xuanyu was using techniques she had taught him to keep Fan Xinyi from throwing him bodily out, albeit not making much progress. “It’s all right, Xinyi. Let him in. I take it you broke the warding?”

He nodded vigorously. “Not only that, I found her! And you’ll never guess what else.”

 

Mo Xuanyu had disobeyed her direct instructions not to explore what lay within the mysterious hidden places without her. He certainly hadn’t mentioned that he was breaking through a mirror portal to a hidden room within Jin Guangyao’s own Fragrant Palace, with Jin Guangyao sleeping only a few walls away. It was only thanks to the strong painkilling draught that Jin Guangyao had downed before sleeping that Mo Xuanyu had not yet been caught. But looking down at Jiang Yanli slumbering before her on a raised pallet, her chest rising and falling beneath a blanket and her cheeks flushed with health as if she was merely sleeping, Qin Su could not bring herself to admonish him.

Qin Su bent to kiss Jiang Yanli, hesitating a breath away before pressing her lips to hers. They were soft and warm, perfectly unchapped without exposure to wind or wine or her own teeth. At first, they were unmoving against hers, and Qin Su worried. Perhaps it wouldn’t work, perhaps they had all been wrong and there was no way to return Jiang Yanli’s soul to her body. But then an arm wrapped around her, settling on her neck to pull her closer as Jiang Yanli’s lips moved beneath hers.

Keeping it brief, perfunctory as if her heart hadn’t sped up to hammer in her chest, Qin Su drew back, but Jiang Yanli stopped her before she could go far.

“I knew you’d do it.” Jiang Yanli pushed herself up on one elbow, tucking a loose strand of hair behind Qin Su’s ear. She pulled her back in, taking advantage of Qin Su’s gasp of surprise to slip her tongue past Qin Su’s lips, drawing her down until she was lying practically on top of her.

Thought stopped for a while.

Finally, Qin Su managed the presence of mind to pull away before her hands could begin to wander. “Not that I don’t want to find out exactly what this is,” she gestured between them. “But…”

Behind her, Mo Xuanyu cleared his throat and waved hesitantly. Jiang Yanli giggled, and greeted him, not seeming the least bit embarrassed, and Mo Xuanyu pointed toward a talisman covered severed head with a distinctive mustache morbidly decorating a shelf.

“Is that…?” Jiang Yanli gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth.

“Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue, his own sworn brother,” Qin Su confirmed. “After all he’s done to me, I have no doubt he’ll do the same to us for half the reason.”

“We have to challenge him while he’s unprepared. And that, if I don’t miss my guess, will tip him off someone’s been in here. If it hasn’t already.” Jiang Yanli pointed to a barely noticeable array on the floor below the mirror portal, its white lines smudged.

“I left messages urgently summoning the Great Sect Leaders with Hanguang-jun.” They had only planned to confront him about concealing Jiang Yanli’s survival, but yesterday’s events—the dead child and extermination of a sect down to the last disciple even before the revelation of incest—had convinced Qin Su that more drastic action was necessary, and that she and A-Song needed to be free of him. “He’ll send them as soon as Wei Wuxian wakes up—I’ll need to send him a butterfly saying you’re awake.”

What they’d found here was proof of how dangerous and duplicitous Jin Guangyao was, and that he could not be allowed to retain his positions. “Jin Guangyao should be asleep a while longer, given the medications he took. I’ll keep him occupied, and Xuanyu will go help Hanguang-jun and Wei Wuxian with the plan, but you’ll need to stay here as if nothing has changed until they arrive.”

Lan Wangji was on his way to Lanling with the sleeping Wei Wuxian already; the end of the spell would hasten their arrival.

“It’s almost dawn. We should go,” Mo Xuanyu said.

Jiang Yanli caught Qin Su by the hand as she turned to go. “Qin Su. I want you to know…”

Qin Su squeezed back. “I think I do. Tell me later, when I’m officially a free woman.”

Difficult as it was to believe she was still desirable after everything, and by someone as wonderful as Jiang Yanli, she hadn’t missed the signs. Hadn’t missed the feeling behind that kiss.

“Later then.” Jiang Yanli kissed the palm of her hand before letting her go.

 

A shimmering butterfly met her when she emerged into the dawn. It dissolved into particles of light upon delivering its message: the plan was in motion.

 

Normality was an act Qin Su had maintained for years. Ordinarily, she would not seek out Jin Guangyao in his rooms, but two days after Jiang Yanli awoke, the physician sent word that he was trying to get out of bed to return to work—and likely investigate the disturbance in his wards. Despite how far from ready she was to see him, she used his illness as an excuse to keep him confined to his bedchamber against his protests. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to suspect her.

Finding him on his feet, she demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Really, A-Su. I feel so much better today, and there’s so much work to be done.” He managed to sound patronizing while looking dead on his feet.

Qin Su pushed a tray full of tea and bland congee, for his stomach, into his chest. He wobbled and sat back down hard on the bed. For this one last day, there were limits to her facade. Touching him was one of them. “Walk in a straight line without holding onto anything.”

He grimaced. “I’m well enough to sit at my desk, A-Su.”

“You left the sect in my hands while you recover. Have I done something to make you believe me incapable in one day?” She kept her voice soft, the way Jin-furen was expected to be, though she wanted to upend the tray over his head.

“Of course not, but —”

“You can eat and take the medicine the physician prescribed. Your work will only be further delayed if you collapse over it.”

“I am suitably chastised. A-Su is correct, of course.”

Qin Su didn’t believe his contrite act. “Do not make me send for Lan-zongzhu to sit on you.” That got him to start eating in a panic, though by this time Lan Xichen would be well on his way by sword. His recent actions following the assassination attempt, were not something gentle-hearted Lan Xichen would have cared for, and Jin Guangyao so hated to disappoint his Er-ge.

At most, her methods would keep him in this cage for half the day, while she kept up the appearance of running the sect as normal, with no expectation of special guests.

After today, she would finally be done with keeping up appearances.

By the early afternoon, guests began to arrive. Jiang Wanyin first, who must have started his journey no more than a day after Qin Su left Yunmeng, given the distance. Then Nie Huaisang, riding seated on the sword of his first disciple, a tall, muscular woman much more in the Nie mold than her sect leader, and Lan Xichen almost on his heels.

Jin Guangyao emerged to greet them with Qin Su on unsteady feet, hiding his confusion at their claims of receiving a summons from him as he ordered rooms to be prepared for their unexpected guests.

Of course, these were not the final guests. While they were still exchanging pleasantries and expressions of concern for Jin Guangyao, Lan Xichen offering him his arm to lean on, Hanguang-jun made his entrance. Unnoticed until he wanted to be, he simply walked up the steps, a masked man in black sauntering along at his side.

“Wangji?” Lan Xichen squinted at his brother’s companion. “But you haven’t been to Lanling since… and who might this be?”

“Is Hanguang-jun not permitted to have friends?” the masked man drawled, and Qin Su had to stop herself from pinching the bridge of her nose. She had to act as surprised as anyone else when—

“Wei Wuxian!” Lan Xichen put his hand on the hilt of his sword, partially drawing it.

Jiang Wanyin, too, yelled Wei Wuxian’s name with surprising conviction. Perhaps less with acting skill, and more with general annoyance.

“Guilty.” Wei Wuxian untied his mask and grinned, unrepentant. His smile was brilliant enough to rival Jiang Yanli’s. It was no wonder the icily beautiful Hanguang-jun had fallen for him. “Did you miss me?”

Qin Su, on cue, gasped and clutched her chest as Nie Huaisang flailed and sputtered about the Yiling Laozu, throwing himself behind Jin Guangyao, himself clinging white-knuckled to Lan Xichen, for protection.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji said, and Wei Wuxian instantly dropped his posturing to turn to him. “You called us friends.”

Was the great Hanguang-jun… pouting?

“Lan Zhan, we are friends, and much more. Husbands, soon.” He put a finger under Lan Wangji’s chin and leaned in for a kiss, soft with long familiarity. “But let’s not forget the topic at hand.”

“What exactly would that be?” Jin Guangyao demanded with a hand over his stomach, looking rather viscerally nauseous.

“Oh, I believe she should be making herself apparent just about now.” Wei Wuxian said, and a loud boom came from the direction of Fragrance Palace, and smoke rose into the air above the roofs. Everyone ran towards it, Lan Xichen helping Jin Guangyao along.

The roof, it seemed, had been blown clean off, and the walls outward onto the ground and into surrounding buildings, creating a ring of rubble. That would be expensive to clean up, but it was satisfying to see the look on Jin Guangyao’s face as he took in the destruction of his home and the exposure of his secrets. For the contents of the secret room were mysteriously untouched down to the shelves that had rested against the missing walls.

“A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli said from where she was seated on the edge of the porch, where the stairs had been moments before. “Next time you see fit to give a teenager explosives, don’t let him mix them himself.”

“Jiang—Jiang Yanli?” Lan Xichen’s jaw dropped, and he stopped dead in his tracks, nearly dropping Jin Guangyao in the dirt.

“A-Jie!” Jiang Wanyin cried, and—utterly forgetting to keep pointing his sword at Wei Wuxian—burst into tears as he rushed to embrace his sister. Jiang Yanli hugged him and patted his back as he wailed, sniffling herself, though she didn’t take her eyes off Jin Guangyao.

“You gave my little brother-in-law explosives?” Qin Su frowned at Wei Wuxian, who shrugged, unrepentant, and leaned into Lan Wangji’s side. She should never have let Wei Wuxian near Mo Xuanyu, but he’d been so excited to meet the Yiling Laozu. At least Mo Xuanyu wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“I did not see that one coming,” she heard Nie Huaisang mutter before raising his voice. “San-ge, what’s going on? What is all this stuff?” Clamoring up into the building, he began to poke around, holding his fan over his mouth when he wasn’t using it to fan away dust as he coughed.

“Huaisang, don’t—” Jin Guangyao started forward to stop his exploration, only for Lan Xichen to hold him back.

“A-Yao, you can barely walk, let me go after him.” Lan Xichen said, placating, which only gave Jin Guangyao motivation to shake him off. He made it as far as the house before he was stopped.

“Is there something you don’t want him to find?” Wei Wuxian asked casually.

“I’m sure my survival is the only secret Jin-Zongzhu is keeping from the world.” Jiang Yanli looked up from beneath her eyelashes as Jiang Wanyin continued sobbing into her sleeve, the portrait of demure innocence.

“What?” Lan Xichen asked, looking between the Jiang siblings and Jin Guangyao in confusion. Even Nie Huaisang seemed less perplexed as he squinted at a knife, moving ever closer to the evidence.

“Did you not wonder at my appearance here of all places? My body was kept here, comatose, for the last six years without my brother’s knowledge.” Her voice was matter of fact, and perhaps that was what made Lan Xichen stop and look twice at his sworn brother.

“A-Yao?”

“We suspected Jiang Yanli’s state had something to do with the Yiling Laozu, and that Jiang Zongzhu would lack objectivity. Clearly, we were correct.” It might have made for a better excuse, had Wei Wuxian shown an interest in anything other than Jiang Yanli’s wellbeing, making snappy commentary, and finding out the maximum amount of bodily contact he could have with Lan Wangji while fully clothed.

“I can see the logic, but if someone hid my brother from me…” Lan Xichen shook his head and increased the distance between them.

The delay had given Nie Huaisang time to uncover his own tragedy. He gave a great, shrieking gasp, his arm shaking as he pointed at the talisman-covered severed head. “You! YOU murdered Dage!” He cried and collapsed in a dead faint into Lan Xichen’s arms, overwrought.

“Did that seem a bit overdone to anyone else?” Wei Wuxian muttered, too quietly for anyone but her and his Hanguang-jun shaped appendage to overhear. Looking closer, Qin Su spotted Nie Huaisang sneaking a peak through one eye. Jiang Yanli nudged Jiang Wanyin to let her up and went to retrieve the head with a cloth, bringing it close enough that its appearance was undeniable.

Lan Xichen half-heartedly tried to fan Nie Huaisang back to consciousness, understandably distracted by the preserved head of what had once been his sworn brother and confidant. “How did… how did Dage’s head come to be in your house?”

Voice cracking with his composure, Jin Guangyao’s arm lashed out, pointing an accusatory finger. “Wei Wuxian is trying to frame me.”

“Wei Wuxian was in a coma under my guard from the battle of Nightless City until a few days ago.” Jiang Wanyin’s glare was all the more deadly with his eyes reddened from tears. 

“I have a technique to see exactly what happened to him,” Wei Wuxian offered helpfully, only for Jiang Wanyin to kick him in the shin, hissing that now was not the time.”

“And we should trust the results of the Yiling Laozu’s work?” Jin Guangyao sneered. “How do we know that’s even Dage’s head? It could have been planted, a fake.”

“Fake,” Qin Su snapped, “like the dead child you hired to pretend to be our son?”

“A-Su, you can’t believe I did this.” He reached out for her arms, and she flinched back instinctively.

“Stop lying and face the consequences. I know who you are and what you did.” Leaning uncomfortably close, she added in a whisper, “Brother.”

His eyes widened, and she used his shock to put distance between them. “Did you poison me? You were prepared to leave—”

Finally, Qin Su could let her contempt show. She had nothing to say to him. Defend herself? From what? His assumption that everyone was as rotten and self-serving as the man Jin Guangyao had become?

“Why?” Lan Xichen asked, achingly raw in his shock, and Jin Guangyao snapped.

A wire flew from his sleeve to wrap around Wei Wuxian’s neck, yanking him against his chest. When Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin moved to attack, he pulled the garrote tighter, and the wire left a line of red across his throat. “Ah-ah, don’t move. If you’re so determined to believe the word of an infamous mass murderer over me, you’ll value his life enough to let me go.”

Jin Guangyao was at his most dangerous when he was backed into a corner. But still weak from poison, he couldn’t dodge when Jiang Yanli threw Nie Mingjue’s head into his back. The force of the impact caused Jin Guangyao to slacken his grip on the garrote, giving Lan Wangji the space to slice through the cord.

Drawing his sword, Jin Guangyao held it up defensively, nearly tripping over Nie Mingjue’s head as he backed away.

Which was precisely when Nie Huaisang sat up and wailed loud enough to make all their ears ring. Jin Guangyao flinched, and Qin Su brought the hilt of her sword down on his temple. He crumpled in a heap.

She hoped he’d wake with the worst headache of his life.

Chapter 4

Her dream did not linger on waking.

It was possible — probable even — that there had been a beautiful woman, clad in gold or purple with a smile like a warm spring day. But the details had begun to fade from the moment Qin Su opened her eyes to find her beautiful, naked wife watching her with a hungry, crooked smile.

Jiang Yanli slowly, gently scraped her nails along the slope of Qin Su’s tits before pinching, sharp and twisting, at the peak. Qin Su gasped, arching her back, her pulse awakening between her thighs. Soothing the sting with her tongue, Jiang Yanli drew the nipple into her mouth.

Qin Su tangled her hands in Jiang Yanli’s hair, all too happy to let her wife devour her every morning if it struck her fancy. And it did, whenever there wasn’t some crisis needing the attention of the Jin Sect Regent, or a child likely to burst in. Which was less often than either of them would have preferred, but Qin Su wouldn’t have traded her life now for anything.

This morning, the boys were with their grumpiest yet most indulgent uncle following a sleepover and would not be interrupting. Qin Su and Jiang Yanli had until whatever hour they decided to emerge, and a silencing talisman on the door to prevent any visiting attendants—who no longer slept outside the door—from overhearing.

“You beat me to it. I had plans.” Qin Su’s words ended in a squeak when Jiang Yanli dragged her teeth across her ribs.

“Are you telling me I can’t have my way with my beautiful wife on my birthday?” Looking up at her from beneath her lashes, Jiang Yanli pressed herself against Qin Su, ensuring she could feel her strap against her thigh. Jiang Yanli had gotten up to tie it on without waking her. Gods.

Lying back, Qin Su gave up her token protest. “My wife can have whatever she wants for her birthday.”

Jiang Yanli’s grin was positively wicked before she lowered her head to leave love bites across Qin Su’s torso with maddening precision. By the time Jiang Yanli turned her attention to her thighs, Qin Su’s cunt was throbbing, her hands twisted tight in Jiang Yanli’s hair and the sheets. Jiang Yanli held down her hips to keep her from squirming.

A few thrusts of tongue in her cunt and the flick of a nail against her clit were all it took to send Qin Su over the edge.

Before she could fully regain her senses from the force of her climax, Jiang Yanli was plunging inside her with an aching slowness. When Qin Su couldn’t stand the torturous contrast with the blood rushing through her veins, a few seconds that felt like an eternity later, she grabbed Jiang Yanli by the ass and bit her wife’s lip, spurring Jiang Yanli to fuck her hard until she was consumed by building sensation and came apart at the seams.

Jiang Yanli untied her strap and nestled into Qin Su’s chest, a substantially flatter surface than her own, which Jiang Yanli claimed made her perfect for cuddling. Nevermind the sticky layer of sweat clinging to both their skins, an artifact of the rising summer heat. Almost six months since their wedding, almost a year since Qin Su was finally free, and she was happier with every passing day.

She trailed a hand down her wife’s side and found her slick between her thighs.

 

Their family had arranged a picnic in the gardens in celebration of Jiang Yanli, to which the guest of honor was expected to be late. The sun was nearly overhead by the time Qin Su and Jiang Yanli made it out, freshly bathed, to find the boys—their sons, with the addition of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian’s adoptive son, and apparently the sole strictly living survivor of the Wen Clan—playing a game of cuju with their uncles and Wen Ning. They paused to watch for a moment from afar.

Likely related, even Mo Xuanyu had been dragged into the game.

Wen Ning had been found behind a false wall in the dungeons, and Mo Xuanyu had developed a sudden interest in archery after meeting the less-fearsome-than-advertised ghost general. This had not helped increase his interest in swordsmanship—though he was improving, with the help of Qin Su and his new teacher—and Wen Ning remained oblivious to Mo Xuanyu’s crush, but it was strengthening his arms.

Jin Ling finally stole the ball from Jiang Cheng but missed the hoop that was his goal. The ball came to a rolling stop at Qin Su’s feet. She kicked it up and back to them, and Wen Ning caught it with his knee, keeping it in the air as he passed it to Lan Yuan to begin the next play. But it was too late, they had been noticed.

“A-Niang, A-Niang! Happy birthday!” A-Song launched himself at Jiang Yanli and she swung him up onto her hip, groaning dramatically at the weight, telling him he was getting too big for this, she wasn’t as strong as Qin Su. And finally, he was growing strong, his childhood illness fading into a distant nightmare.

It was only recently that A-Song had begun calling Jiang Yanli mother, though he had jumped at the chance to call Jin Ling simply gege, and to acquire several new uncles.

A-Song was still too young to understand what had happened to the father fading into his memory, but part of him knew something terrible had happened. One day she would have to tell him everything. Qin Su wouldn’t keep the truth from her son the way her mother had from her to disastrous consequence. No one else beyond her wife and her brother would ever need to know.

During transit, Jin Guangyao had reportedly tried to escape, forcing Lan Xichen to kill him. Lan Xichen had locked himself into partial seclusion and was particularly refusing contact from Nie Huaisang for reasons he would not share.

Qin Su thought she might have preferred Jin Guangyao to have to live with his disgrace, but his death would be easier for her as well as him. This way, it was over. In death, he held no power over her, could not damage her reputation or her son’s.

There had been some question of Qin Su’s involvement in his crimes, primarily by fools with the surnames Yao and Ouyang, that might have more easily been cleared up if she had revealed it, but Qin Su did not want her birth father’s legacy, and the world did not need to know what Jin Guangyao had done to her. She had a father who loved her, and learning the truth now, with his health fragile, would break him.

Jiang Yanli’s refusal to hear a word against her, and public insistence that Qin Su had saved her life had been nearly as effective. As the heir’s mother and rightful regent of Lanling Jin, and with Qin Su’s experience running the sect to aid her, Jiang Yanli had quickly become influential in the cultivation world, no matter her low cultivation.

Remarrying with unseemly quickness was a scandal Qin Su could weather, and one even the worst gossips of the cultivation world agreed was trading up.

After a moment, A-Song let go of her wife and wandered off to attempt to convince Wen Ning that their team would fare better if he gave A-Song a piggyback ride. Lan Yuan made a very eloquent supporting argument for why this would be an interesting experiment, displaying the influence of each of his fathers in equal measure. Meanwhile, Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian extracted themselves to greet their sister with birthday wishes. Jiang Cheng did so normally, albeit with somewhat excessive formality. Wei Wuxian on the other hand—

“Thank the heavens you’re here! I thought we’d never take a break.” Wei Wuxian panted dramatically, despite the fact that he was in good shape, and barely sweating. “Happy birthday, Shijie.”

“Thank you, didi.” Jiang Yanli said and raised a brow. “But I know you just want my wife to take your place because Lan Wangji isn’t playing.

Lan Wangji was seated in the shade under the heavy branches of an old tree, guarding the picnic supplies against birds and squirrels. He was missing an outer layer of robes, presumably courtesy of his husband’s influence, and the poor Lan heat tolerance. 

“Guilty!” he said with no shame. And then, with a little bit of shame, “Though I am, of course, here to see you,” which prompted Jiang Yanli to tap him on the nose and call him only one year old.

“Wei Wuxian did you bring what I asked for?” Qin Su had commissioned him to paint Jiang Yanli with both of their sons as a birthday gift. After Jin Guangyao’s death, his collaborator Su Minshan had attempted to use demonic cultivation to take revenge, using a flute as his tool. Backlash from the curse that killed Jin Zixun was discovered on his chest after he was captured, and Wei Wuxian had been acquitted of those crimes he had not committed. The ones he had committed were largely forgotten now thanks to the status of his siblings and husband. Now he took art commissions just to spoil his husband and son with gifts, when he wasn’t busy finventing new talismans.

“Of course, who do you think I am?” He pouted in mock offense.

“Then I can take you place in the game for a little while before lunch,” Qin Su told him and received an exuberant hug for her trouble. “Jiang Cheng, prepare to lose!”

 This earned a “Hey!” from the man in question.

“Then I’ll count on you.” Wei Wuxian glanced toward Lan Wangji, kneeling on a blanket, waiting for him. “If you’ll excuse me…”

Jiang Yanli laughed. “Go on, you eternal newlywed.”

“Can you blame me?” Wei Wuxian asked cheekily and ran off to tackle his husband onto his back.

“A-Jie, they’re revolting,” Jiang Cheng whined, though Qin Su thought she saw Lan Wangji laughing between playful, teasing kisses. Hardly scandalous, compared to some of their behavior.

“Perhaps you should go back to play with the children if you’re going to act like a child,” Jiang Yanli informed him with her unique brand of gentle sarcasm.

“Perhaps I will.” Huffing, he turned up his nose and proceeded to steal the ball from A-Song, who had been practicing keeping the ball in the air with mixed success. A-Song blinked after him for a moment before running after, shouting that Jiujiu was cheating. Jiang Cheng passed the ball to Jin Ling as he approached the basket, who sank it through in the goal.

That was it, Qin Su was going to trounce Jiang Cheng.

“I’m off to defend our A-Song’s honor. Give me a kiss for luck?” Qin Su slid her hand along Jiang Yanli’s jaw and pulled her in as she turned her face down to meet her. There would always be magic where their lips met, not limited to healing spells and dreams. A better magic, the one they made together.

Notes:

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! Please give some appreciation to Raine's art and I appreciate all kudos and comments!

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