The Scholar Garden thrived anew in the embrace of the palace walls in Sutao. The ancient flower beds had been replenished with new color by the mute gardeners. The patterns had been re-inscribed on the sand of the rock beds by the scribes. In the same manner, the fields had been resown and the broken dams - rebuilt outside of the palace walls after the rages of war. In the Scholar Garden, one could be forgiven a delusion that all was well in the Evershining Empire and all of Tiandi.
Ten thousand learned footfalls had landed on these moss-tinged stone paths before Xi's bare soles made their first imprints in the dirt. The purple ribbon of a war mage he wore to gain admission to the hallowed grounds, felt woefully inadequate. His head swam, his torn flesh throbbed, and his thoughts ached just as dully as his body from the overexertion of passing his test.
He wished there would have been time to have the robes made before he went to see Zijun. Or for his hair to grow out enough to conceal the starkness of his shaven skull. So little in his appearance announced his new status, just one thin purple ribbon... He felt it though, both the burden and the delight, as he passed the Pavilion of Chronicles, and the scribes lifted their heads from the scrolls to give him wistful stares. Slowing down his steps, out of respect for their need to focus, he smiled. The focus was not existential for them, only for him. Without focus, the intellect and emotion of his hsin would unravel, his emotions so long repressed to shape logic would run wild and tear him apart.
Past the Pavillion of Chronicles, by the court historian's residence, the palace gardeners planted chrysanthemums. Such a waste of labor! Master Shan Jiang, the court historian, his tutor, preferred chrysanthemum wine to the flowers with their wintry scent.
His smile grew wider, despite his hurting cheek, as Xi stepped inside looking for Master Jiang's favorite pupil, Zijun. She also was his housekeeper, and if she had any other roles, Xi did not want to know. Zijun was his sister in every way that counted, the closest soul to him from birth, and he was afraid to mess with her happiness.
He found her by her favorite window, head bent over a scroll with more willingness than he'd observed in the scribes. Xi stood for a moment behind the beaded curtain, watching her send the brush fly, then frown, and, again, frown then send the brush fly.
"I can hear you breathe, brother."
Milk brother, actually, but brevity was important for poets. He parted the beads and came to wait for her to finish her work by her side.
The sun shone through the window panels. She saw egrets landing on the rapids, he saw the pricey many-veined paper imported from the kingdom of Taebong or somewhere else in the North. He peered over her gauze sleeve at the paper. "Can I see?"
She shielded the scroll with her hand. "It is not ready. Besides, what use do you have for women's poetry..." Zijun's eyes darted to his smarting scars, before she added, "...Xi."
Before his magic manifested, before his mother brought him to Rustam Bei, Zijun called him Xi. They both were four years old back then, and for a while, after Rustam took his name, she kept on calling him Xi, and cried when he would not reply. She did not understand how much of a change had it been for him to go from a boy to a mage apprentice, but she would understand now. She understood everything, she was a poet.
Xi's breath caught in his throat as he fingered his ribbon. He did not bother with restoring it before blurting out, "I did it, Zijun! I earned my birth-name back — I wanted so much to be the one to tell you... I came as fast as I could stand on my feet again."
She chewed the end of her brush. "A man who wishes to own secrets, should not live in a palace."
He understood what she said, every word. He focused on that despite the sharp teeth of disappoint tearing into his mind. "I... I see. If you are not happy to see me, I'll go."
He put a jade medallion on the corner of her writing desk and got up to leave.
She did not say anything.
He walked, much slower than the strides that brought him through the Scholar's Garden to the court historian's residence, to Zijun.
She did not speak up until he was stepping through the softly clicking curtain in the doorway. "Did you wrestle a tiger to pass your test, Xi?"
"No." He coughed to cover up the high-pitched whine in his voice. Oddly, his heart lept up with hope — maybe she cared.
"Then who left you the scars? Your magic bird? Or did a dragon swoop in?"
"No..." If he still sounded like a sulky boy, her voice was laced with pent up fury. By some reason it made him feel — just feel. He fumbled to get rid of the emotion — any emotion. Emotions were proscribed to the mages and for a good reason. He must not feel. He must think, always think.
She pretended to gasp, the ink-stained, but exquisite fingers fluttering to the cherry-bud of her mouth. "Can it be? A Celestial descended from the Heavenly Realm to test our marvelous Xi?"
"No!" He could not fool himself, he was furious, and fury was for women and madmen. Xi coughed it away too, slowing down the flow of his words as much as he could. "I did it to myself, Zijun, and if your informant did not tell you that, you should find someone else to gossip with. I do not understand your ire."
As Zijun shifted, her desk tilted, sending his green medallion to the floor. She ignored it but caught her bowl of ink. "It did not sound nearly special enough for the grandson of the Ageless Empress, the only son of the Gracious Lady Tien Lyn, and now -- a war mage at nineteen! The mage, I should add, bonded to a fenghuang when all the other mages have to be content with magpies and finches. Have I forgotten a distinction, Xi?"
His thoughts raced dangerously, threatening to unbalance him. He pressed his fingers into his temples as if it could squeeze away madness. "Zijun, take pity on me! I cannot afford another night of recitations to put my mind back in order. Are you trying to drive me mad?"
"Why should I care," she said coldly, "about your mind? You spared not a single thought to my entire person when you decided to storm away in search of your mother."
He blinked, fighting the chaos her words were raising, clinging to the line from an epic poem, his mother's favourite mantra, Modest yet cruel was Empress Mei, modest yet cruel...
"Oh, wait. You did spare a thought..." Zijun restored her belongings on the desk and twirled the medallion around with her finger. "Should I be content with this farewell gift? Your mother left you a living porcelain doll to play with and to grow up with, when she'd run off with her demon-lover. A lovely doll called Zijun."
"My mother did not run off, Yu is not a demon," Xi muttered desperate to uphold order and truth, "and you are not my doll."
"What is any woman, but a doll, Xi? I am a peasant girl, whose presence was tolerated in the palace only because my mother nursed you to spare lady Tien Lyn's gracious tits."
Xi gritted his teeth: she was acting deliberately coarse. It reminded him of the occasions when she had let her hair escape the combs as a child to spite the handmaidens. The heavy strands were too thick, too rigid to be compared to silk and mocked everything the court treasured. He loved her frolics as a boy, but now, directed against him, her mockery felt undeserved. "You are not— you are Master Jiang's star pupil—" he shut up rather than squeak out another incomplete sentence.
"And what shall I do with my excellent knowledge of classic writings, my playing qin, my poetry, and all these masculine skills that were intended for you? What shall I do with myself once you are gone? Who has a need of Xi's lowborn milk sister?"
He swallowed another bitter nothing he had to say.
"Take me away with you." She switched from scorn to pleading so fast that Xi reeled back. "Take me away, Xi. I know that the mages have no need for the rain-and-cloud love, but I can be everything else. Anything you need, Xi..."
Perplexed by this change, and wary, Xi studied her. Was she really pleading with him now, not he with her? Why bring up the rain-and-cloud love when they were a brother and sister, and he was a mage with carnal knowledge outside his reach? He did not get the answers from looking into her eyes, but they grew huge and vulnerable. He had never seen them so close.
The decision, clearer than a winter's morning, simpler than adding numbers, was right in front of him. Then he summed up the total, and it came out all wrong. "I... am sorry, I can't. I am not going alone, Zijun."
She folded the end of her gauze sleeve into a tiny fan. "I have forgotten. Other men ride horses, but Chong Xi flies a magic bird. The fenghuangs do not suffer intruders lightly."
Xi realized that Zijun's curiosity deserted her in this melancholic hour, so he did not try to explain the efforts required for him to act as one with his bonded magic companion in order not to tumble out of the skies. "I will return very soon, you'll see. I need to save my mother, then I will take care of you, I promise! I am a mage now. I can do so much more."
"Oh, do not burden yourself so," Zijun smiled at him, her face — a mask of courtesy. "There are many tall pines on the mountain slopes for a vine to climb. Leave as if you were leaving nothing behind. Go save your mother and her demon, sixteenth mage."
"Yu is not a demon," he repeated stubbornly. Secretly, Xi had always called him that, so why was he defending Yu now? It only made him resent his mother's lover more.
"If he is not a demon, then why didn't you go to the faeries to heal your face? Now that I think of it, you hadn't asked for faery healing for as long as I'd known you. You are afraid Xi, aren't you?" Her laughter climbed to a crescendo and ended on a trilling chuckle. "You are afraid that the faery will find out just how special your qi is, this demon's qi, is not it? You are afraid, that Yu is your father."
"I am never sick, that's why I do not need faery's healing!" Xi pushed the stupid curtain out of his eyes, making the beads jingle just like Zijun.
"My father is Chong Ho, the merchant." His hand snaked to the breast of his shirt where he'd used to keep a scroll. The paper, damaged by fire, was too frayed and locked away in his room now, but he remembered every stroke of it. Most who had seen it did not recognize his father's art as a drawing of a tree, but he did, and at first glance. It was a tree broken into its parts, a sum of its elements, a tree as seen by someone with the same hsin, the same mind, the same Understanding as Xi's.
"I am Chong Ho's son, not Yu's!" With that childish outburst, he fled the house to stand under the open sky. It was always easier to focus outside.
Slumping against the pavilion's wall, Xi breathed in and out the bitter scent of chrysanthemums, while his mind churned through the rote mental exercises to regain the state of clarity.
He could hear Zijun crying inside, and he would have gone back in to mend things, if a quiet voice did not hail him.
A squat black-clad man stopped some distance away. His face was wide, deceptively placid, with the wide-set eyes of a man born in the Northern Steppes. Once he had his attention, Rustam Bei, his former master, inclined his head in an invitation to join him and started walking away. Xi trotted after the dark figure obediently, despite their one-day-old equality of status.
"It is more difficult to start a journey of your own design than leave on someone else's errand," Rustam started conversationally, "and the more you prolong them, the more burdensome the farewells become."
"Zijun, she—" Xi shook his head. "I don't know what will become of her, and I am worried."
"Do you want to play a part in that? As a mage, you will live to see ten or more generations to follow one another. Lend your interest to too many people — and their brief affairs would flood your mind. You had just pledged yourself to your mother."
Xi focused on avoiding stepping on the cracks between the stones. He also focused on avoiding saying, yes, Master. But there could be no mistake, this was a lesson, even if it was masked as a friend's advice.
After the silence lasted long enough to satisfy him, Rustam stopped again.
They had come to the Court of Reflections, with a clear pond spanned by a white arch of a bridge in the middle of it. A single willow, golden after autumn's first chilly exhale, knitted the carved stone and the crystalline water together. The day was calm, and the blue of the sky colored the unbroken pond surface. Zijun would have said that the water turned to the sky. Xi stared into the water wishing to understand how one could come up with such a strange thought.
Rustam also took in the view of the reflected heavens and koi circling through it, then frowned finding the obvious lack of anything interesting in the pond. "I have a favor to ask of you, Chong Xi."
When Rustam bowed formally after making this request, Xi finally embraced the truth: he was now a mage and ageless.