(no subject)

[questingly]

The fog had yet to lift. It dampened Fei Liying’s clothes, like the water lapping at the stones wet her feet. Distance swallowed the boat with its white sails, leaving only ripples in its wake.

They’d left at dawn.

Liying had watched from afar, hidden by branches. A small, slim figure had paused as he stepped onto the boat, his quietly earnest eyes searching for something behind him. Disappointment fell like an early winter night and the boy climbed onto the boat without another glance. He hadn’t seen her.

And now he was gone, the last of her baby brothers, taken by the world beyond.

Liying took a step back, eyes still fixed on the horizon. A world she hated for taking everyone she loved, and a world she’d never step into.

Not a week had passed since her solemn, soft-spoken cousin had sought her out at dawn.

“I have to go,” Yixi had said.

“You’re only sixteen!”

“I’m almost seventeen, jiejie.” Yixi’s eyes were steady and grave.

“You can’t go,” Liying said, with a furious shake of her head. “I won’t let you go.”

“You can’t stop me,” Yixi said.

“Zhiyuan gege isn’t even there anymore—”

“I know. That’s why I’m going.”

“You can’t!”

“Yiyuan gege is with him. I can’t sit aside either.”

Yixi was the youngest, but he’d always carried himself with a maturity too heavy for his age. Yiyuan was eager and earnest, and Yikai had grown into the strength and confidence expected of him, but Yixi had been different. It was like he’d come into this world with his soul fully formed and already burdened with wisdom. It’d retreat behind bursts of playfulness as he tumbled with his cousins—but it’d grown as he’d grown.

He was only sixteen, but as Liying looked into those steadfast eyes, she no longer saw the eyes of a child.

“It’s hard to let them go,” Song Qian said from behind her.

Liying didn’t know when her older cousin had come, or if she’d been there all along. She felt Song Qian move closer, but couldn’t tear her eyes away from the horizon.

“But there’s no other choice,” her cousin said, and there was a sadness and wistfulness Liying couldn’t understand.

She didn’t want to understand.

“He’s too young,” Liying said, like it’d bring the boat back. “He’s only sixteen.”

“We were all sixteen once,” Song Qian said. It was true, but it didn’t change that Yixi was still too young.

“Why is he going there? Why is he going to that horrible place?” Liying bit back a sudden burst of despair, swallowed the heat threatening to rise in her eyes. Nothing good came of that place.

“Because he feels like he must.”

“He’s barely even met Zhiyuan gege!”

“And there are those who have never met him who will make the same choice, Lili,” Song Qian said. Liying’s heart lurched at her childhood nickname.

She’d never felt so young. So helpless.

“Then why won’t father let us help?” Liying cried. She spun in place, desperation clawing at her chest. Song Qian’s eyes were impassive, her expression almost blank. “If it’s the right thing to do, why can’t we just go and make things right? If father calls together all the clans, there’s no army that can stop us! All we have to do is kill the traitors—”

“Liying.”

“Jiejie, you agree with me, don’t you?”

Song Qian shook her head. Without warning, she gathered Liying to her and held her tight. Pressed against Song Qian’s chest, Liying could feel her cousin’s trembles.

“That is not our way,” Song Qian said softly. “It is not our place to interfere, or to choose for others. Just like Yixi has chosen his own path and we allowexd Yiyuan to choose his, each warrior lives by their own honour. Just like you do, Lili. Your heart understands honour, but to live by it is not always easy.”

“Is that why no one stopped Aunt?” Liying didn’t mean to ask the question. Song Qian’s grip tightened, and Liying wished even more to unask it.

“Yes, I think so,” Song Qian answered, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Am I really like her?” She’d never met her aunt, Song Qian and Zhiyuan’s Lady Mother. The adults would all say it: ‘like a young Meiying.’

“I don’t know,” Song Qian said. She let go of Liying and stepped back. Liying should’ve been surprised by Song Qian’s neutral expression, but she also couldn’t be. “I did not know my Lady Mother when she was as young as you.”

Liying couldn’t raise her head. She felt ashamed and foolish. Of course her cousin couldn’t know.

“I wish I…” Liying trailed off, words dying unsaid. Song Qian grasped Liying’s hands like she’d heard her anyway, like she understood.

“Mother would’ve loved you,” Song Qian said softly. “She knew you were brave and kind and strong, and the boys would always tell her about you.”

Her heart lurched in her chest. Good things? she almost asked, but ‘the boys’ never would’ve said anything but. Zhiyuan gege and Xueyan gege had always been the nicest family to her.

At the thought of Xueyan, a darkness fell across her shoulders.

She hated him. She had to hate him. His warm smile and kind eyes appeared in her mind, mocking her. It’d all been a lie. A lie that had driven out Zhiyuan gege and ripped away her baby Yixi. He was a traitor.

“He’s not as young as you think he is,” Song Qian was saying.

Liying dragged her thoughts away from Xueyan gege, grasping desperately onto Song Qian’s voice. She wasn’t talking about Xueyan gege. Yixi—she must’ve been talking about Yixi.

“He’s only sixteen,” Liying found herself repeating.

“Did you think yourself young when you were sixteen?” Song Qian asked. She gently lead Liying by the hand away from the shore, and then sat them down on a fallen tree.

Sixteen seemed a lifetime ago.

“I was young,” Liying said. She looked down at her hands, and to the ground beneath her feet. “I didn’t feel young.”

“When Mother left for the capital, she wasn’t much older than Yixi is now,” Song Qian said. There was that inevitable sadness whenever Song Qian spoke of her mother, and Liying wished she could stop her cousin. Tell her she didn’t need to tell Liying these things.

Instead, what Liying said was: “why?”

“I don’t know,” Song Qian said without hesitation, but Liying heard the doubt beneath those words.

She couldn’t push.

“They won’t follow me,” Liying said. This time, she spoke into the distance, her eyes fixed on a torn leaf. “Not even the Fei clan would. I’m not strong enough. But everyone thinks Yikai will be strong enough. What will happen if he isn’t?”

“A leader will always emerge,” Song Qian said. “This isn’t a court and we aren’t a dynasty, meimei. Strength will rule, but there is more to strength than fighting.”

“I understand,” Liying murmured, chastised. “Is… Is Zhiyuan gege strong enough?”

Is Xueyan gege? she’d almost added. He’d never be blood, but she was a daughter of jianghu and blood did not hold sway here the way it did at court. He was strong. Liying remembered that. Always kind and always strong. Even Zhiyuan gege seemed to listen to him. That had always baffled her.

"Yes,” Song Qian answered without hesitation. “He is stronger than you could ever know. And I think Yixi is very much the same, Liying.”

Song Qian shook her head in a minute motion, silencing Liying’s reactionary protest.

“I always thought Hakyeon and Taekwoon were my baby brothers, but they’re younger than I am by nearly the same years Yixi is younger than you,” Song Qian said. Her eyes were gentle but sorrowful, and Liying realised with a lurch that Song Qian had mentioned Xueyan. It’d been a long time since Liying had heard his name, because it was now one to be cursed.

She was right, as well. Liying had never thought of it, because her older, royal cousins had always seemed on the brink of adulthood. Song Qian jiejie called them her baby brothers, but Liying had always thought of them as men.

They too, had once been as old as Yixi.

Liying looked down at her hands, and not for the first time wished away the callouses, the scars from childish carelessness she’d brushed off at the time. Fei Meiying had probably never had those scars. Song Qian didn’t either.

“Jiejie, can I ask you a question?”

“Have you ever needed to ask?”

“Why can’t you lead the clan?”

Song Qian stilled. At first, Liying thought it might’ve been in anger, and she shouldn’t have asked the question at all. Except the stillness had come even before she’d voiced that strange thought.

There were always echoes in this world, ones that spanned time and space and Liying had unwittingly stepped into another. She couldn’t have known of the autumn day her words recalled. Always, my dear child, Song Qian seemed to hear, as she looked into the face of her young cousin who people said was so much like her mother. It was not her mother that she saw in those youthful eyes, but another one of her mother’s children. How strange that no one ever remarked of how similar she was to Taekwoon. They had the same perverse determination, unyielding justice, and the tendency to act first from the heart before reining those actions back with steel cold logic. And they had the same eyes.

Perhaps there lay another echo here, from a time forever unvisited by the two young women sitting near the lake. Another ‘why’, a different ‘why’, and a choice that answered the why with a heart filled with spark and the purest of all human emotion.

It had not been two young women, but a girl and a boy afraid to let his older sister go. Afraid for her, and afraid of what it’d mean for him.

A faint echo, this one. An echo that’d lie forever unmarked by man, lingering only in the fabric of the ceaselessly turning world.

And in another echo lay the simplicity of the answer, between mother and daughter.

“Because I do not want to.”

She could’ve said it was not her place, and it would’ve been true. She could’ve said it was beyond her, and some would’ve said it to be true. But of all the reasons she chose, it was the one afforded to her as a daughter of jianghu, and forever refused to the son of the dragon.

And as much as Liying yearned not to understand, there was a truth to Song Qian’s words she couldn’t deny.