Chapter 24: The Demon Lord Keeps His Jailer

The peach tree in the yard bloomed again on the first morning of the new century.

Wuhen woke to it, and to a hen, and to the particular weight of a head on his chest.

Chenjue slept.

One arm lay across Wuhen's middle.

On the wrist of it, bright in the sun, sat the green cuff, with a length of chain tucked under the pillow.

He had not taken it off in a year.

Wuhen touched it with one finger.

It was warm.

Round his own neck, on a red cord, the small green key lay in the hollow of his throat.

"You're thinking," Chenjue mumbled.

"I'm admiring my property."

"Mm. Which?" Chenjue asked.

"All of it."

Chenjue opened one eye, dark red and sleepy, and smiled.

"Good morning, Jailer."

"Good morning, Demon Lord."

It was a joke now.

It had been a joke for a year, and neither of them had ever been able to stop saying it.

He looked well.

His hair lay black-red across the pillow, loose, and the cracked places in his core had not stirred since the night on the lake shore.

Wuhen had checked them every week.

He had not once found a seam.

His own reflection in the basin told a different story from the one it had a year ago.

He had put on flesh, and color had come back into his face.

The white at his temples had grown out black.

Only the streak at the front remained, a stripe of frost in the dark, and he had refused every remedy Chenjue had offered for it.

"It suits me," he had said.

"It's the only vain thing about you."

"I've earned one."

They went down to the river in the afternoon.

Wuhen walked.

He walked the whole way, two hundred paces to the bridge, with a hand in Chenjue's.

At the top he stopped to look at the water pink with fallen blossom.

Chenjue stood beside him with one palm flat in the small of his back, not holding, only there.

It was the same bridge.

It was the same blossom, and the same children running under the same trees with paper kites.

It was nothing like it.

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