At the same time that Lin Zhen was opening Cao Yan along the centre of his chest and Elder Ren was burying his blade in the throat of an old friend, Lin Xuan was twenty paces from both of them, and the conversation his sword had been carrying with Madam Mei had not yet finished.

Mei was bleeding from two places already — a six-inch furrow across her left flank where Twin Dragon Strike had bitten her on the second exchange, and a thin runnel along her right forearm she had picked up in the third. The silvered blade in her hand had begun to take the wet from the rain. Her hair was darkened with it. The composed half-smile she had been carrying through the first half of the engagement was gone.

Mira opened the inner channel with the careful weight of an operative who had decided this was a serious afternoon to be alive in.

[ Stay with me, Xuan. You two are at the same rank, which makes this a real fight for either of you. What your stepbrother decides is going to weigh in here as well. Your father and Elder Ren cannot reach this corner of the road. The remaining sect guards are pinned across the rest of the pass doing what they can in their own engagements. What you brought is what you have. ]

’Understood. My head is cold, don’t worry.’

[ Glad to hear that. I’m going to be flagging things you may not catch in real time, if that helps. ]

’It would help. Thank you, Mira.’

[ Duck. ]

Lin Xuan dropped his weight into his heels before the word had finished arriving. A curved Blood Fang dagger — thrown sidearm from somewhere along the flank where the disciples were dying — passed through the air where his throat had been a heartbeat earlier. The dagger kept travelling. It carried straight into the line Madam Mei was holding, and Mei parried it out of reflex with the silvered blade. The two pieces of steel met with the small flat crack of a woman who had been duelling for twenty years catching an object she had not invited.

The dagger spun into the mud at her feet.

The combat began for the real this time.

Mei came forward in three quick steps. The silvered blade described a shallow upward arc at Lin Xuan’s wrist. He parried it down and across, Plain Steel finding her line through the rain. The two blades touched, parted, touched again — three crosses inside two breaths, all of them at the wrist, none of them clearing a route to the body.

She broke distance with a half-step back and lifted her voice toward the centre of the road.

"Lin Kai! Help your mother, now!"

The voice cut across the rain like a thrown plate. It carried no calculation, no first-wife elegance, no maternal warmth she had not earned the right to use after the last quarter of an hour.

Lin Kai did not answer.

He had not moved.

His knees were in the mud. His feet were nowhere. The rain came down on the back of his neck and ran into the inside of his collar, and the cold of it did not register because nothing was registering, because the inside of his skull had been overrun by an arithmetic he did not yet have the courage to finish.

’When did this start going wrong?’

The question came up first. The easy question.

’Xuan has been in this house since forever. Always brilliant. A talent above mine since the day he first picked up a wooden sword in the practice yard. Father has always appreciated him more than he has appreciated me. Always. I have known this since I was little and I have eaten around the knowing of it for years.’

A breath. The rain in his mouth.

’It is Xuan’s fault. It has to be Xuan’s fault.’

’If he had not survived the cliff. If he had not come back from his bed. If he had not won Yuncheng. If he had stayed where my mother and I had assumed he was going to die quietly. None of this would be happening to me right now.’

He repeated the sentence three times inside his head because the sentence did not fit the shape it was being asked to fit. But the sentence was the easy one, and he was not yet ready to reach for the harder one. So he kept it where it was.

Lin Xuan passed into the opening of Storm Dragon — four consecutive cuts in distinct angles, none of them prepared for, each one written so as to flow from the recoil of the previous. The first found the corner of Mei’s shoulder. The second was parried high. The third opened the side of her sleeve. The fourth was caught by the flat of her silvered blade at an angle that should have cost her the wrist but did not, because Mei had been practising the form’s counter for a decade and the form’s counter required exactly that angle.

She broke off into two retreating paces.

The two of them now had a body’s length between them.

Lin Xuan did not press. He held Plain Steel at a middle posture and watched her chest move. Her breathing had gone shallower than it had been at the first cross. She was carrying the three wounds and the cost of fighting at a level she had not earned the lung capacity for. He was carrying the rain.

She would last another two exchanges before the body began to refuse.

She knew it.

She did one of the few things she had left.

She lifted her weight onto the balls of her feet, brought the silvered blade horizontal across her chest, and set the two pieces of her own anatomy into the posture that meant she was preparing the largest thing she could prepare with what she had remaining.

[ She is reaching for her last card. ]

’I can see that.’

[ You have time for one of yours. Pick the one. ]

’Beidou.’

[ Faster than the rain, please. ]