

The Archer Who Shot Down Suns

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Copyright 2014 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead are purely coincidental. All rights are reserved.

"The Crows Her Dragon's Gate" © 2013 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

"Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon" © 2012 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

"Chang'e Dashes from the Moon" © 2012 Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without express written permission from the author.

Introduction

Before there was Scale-Brightthere were short stories. I used to call them - somewhat literally! - 'the Sun-Moon Cycle', but they since gave rise to my debut novella Scale-Bright (Immersion Press, 2014). They aren't necessary to enjoy the novella, but I've put them together for ease of access in chronological order.  All stories take place before Scale-Bright

"The Crows Her Dragon's Gate" (first published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2013. Ed. Scott H. Andrews). The story of Xihe, the mother of suns, when she was young and the world was new: how she met her husband, lost herself, and found it again.

"Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon" (first published in GigaNotoSaurus,2012. Ed. Ann Leckie). Houyi rose in heaven, bow and arrow in hand: the hunt was her joy, the slaying of demons her delight. But most delightful was a serving girl called Chang'e.

"Chang'e Dashes from the Moon" (first published in Expanded Horizons,2012. Ed. Dash). Chang'e has been a prisoner on the moon while the world turns and cities rise. For centuries Houyi has looked for a way to free her wife, and now she has found it in a distant grand-niece: a young mortal woman named Julienne.

The Crows Her Dragon's Gate

Before the end there would be love-songs to a passion so fierce that the offspring of my body turned into suns; tales of our courtship a wildfire that scorched the world.

The annals of heavens may not always be trusted. They were texts carefully edited, passed to chosen scholars; it did well to remind the warlords—and once empire dreams had come true, the monarchs calling themselves heaven's sons—that above them reigned paradise, and above paradise an everlasting emperor.

Much was elided and confused. But in the beginning, it was mostly that I was young.

The Huang He was new, freshly disgorged from a dragon's gullet, brimming with stomach-lizards and fish with scales thick as lamellar. The heat drew me, as it too must have drawn him. And so I found Dijun by the banks with knees drawn up like a boy, gazing into the waters. In his palms flame detonated into monsters that cavorted to the edge of his nails and spilled onto the grass, turning green to black-brown.

I measured and watched him through the frame of my hands. What did I know of him then? That he was an oddity, not unlike me; that he was without a place at court, without sworn brothers earned through blood and fire. A lack that left him wifeless, for all that women gazed upon him as they would on rare silverwork. They would glance at him, and sigh a little, and look away. Untitled and unpositioned, what husband could he make?

I did not think of positions or titles.

He noticed my approach, and his smile intrigued me, for aesthetically it was most pleasing. Being young I mistook this for something else; being young I thought beauty was all there was.

"Would you like to try?" He held out his hand, where many-eyed beasts spun through their deaths and rebirths, purer each time, finer with each cycle.

"How did you know?"

"Your shadow moves on its own even when heaven's light stands still. Like calls to like." Dijun hesitated. "And I find I cannot look away from your radiance."

I inclined my head. Men offered flattery; women accepted with poise. That was the way of things. We examined one another; he in fascination, I for lack of conversation. Portrait-still, portrait-flattened. To escape that tableau I thought of heat. It flared out of me, gusting into two wings that multiplied, quartet then decaplet.

I'd thought he would take to it, my natural kindred. He recoiled. "That is wild. Have you never taught yourself control?"

Until that moment it'd never struck me that this required discipline, anymore than did breathing or laughing, or searching for the true face of the sky. "No, why would I?"

He frowned at me. "Unreined it'll bring disaster. This will burn even immortals." Leaning close he gripped my wrists, his breath on my cheeks. "Let me teach you."

I wanted to tell him: no, I had never burned anything, anyone. That I did not want guidance, for this was part of me, like my tongue and my feet, and why did he want to teach me how to use those? I was no infant; I was no child.

But for a reason I wouldn't be able to name until years after—years stretching between us like clouds unrolling beneath chariot wheels—I was silent; I was silenced and could not demur. I let him, could not quite pull away, show me how to coax the flame and bring order that it did not need. I let him teach me what I already understood.

Pulse hot in my throat I went away from him rubbing the places where he'd touched, the fingerprints on my arms.

This, too, was easy to mistake for an entirely different emotion.

* * *

Winter was air sizzling against my skin, snow hissing to steam on my hair, a susurrus in my ears: Xihe, Xihe. Had I a mother she'd have warned me, Your vanity is how men will ensnare you, little daughter—but I gestated in the dreams of birds and left them fully grown: a woman's silhouette, no childhood behind and no old age before to give it substance.

I would have liked to be someone's daughter, to call someone my aunt. But all I had was my older self, teeth bared in angry laughter.

Winter was shelter too, for Dijun hated that season. He courted status more desperately than he courted me, and he thought the cold would diminish him. It would not; only why tell him that? This was my place, this was my peace.

In my contemplation I could have missed the girl. Only look another way, sidestep rather than forward, take a different turn—any of this and the storm would have sifted over, burying her fortune. How small that chance; how breakable her life. Humans were so prone to death it was a marvel that they survived to fulfill their allotted span, a fraction's fraction of my own.

Furs in the snow like slain carcasses: she was wrapped in layers of them, had curled in upon herself to retain heat. I brushed away the flakes on her cheeks and lifted her up. So light, so small, as though mortals were made of a substance less dense and less real than mine.

A wolf's den. The beast, litter-mother, towered over me even as it slept. It woke and made room.

At my behest it extended a paw, gathering the girl to its belly like a pup. I left and returned with lychees from my garden, fed from seed to fruit with fire. Stripping it of skin and seed I fed to the mortal flesh like meat, flesh like liquor; blood-red and just as hot.

The girl woke like that in my lap around a mouthful of sweetness, of warmth leaping in the jugular and bounding in the stomach. Flush with this heat she'd changed colors. She spluttered laughter through chapped lips. "They told us death would look like a field in summer, not a giant wolf and a woman."

"There's no field," I said sharply, and did not tell her that the afterlife was far harsher than the wolf. "Nor am I of the world below. What insult. What were you doing in the storm?"

Her name was Lin, and she did not believe I was real, my throat and head bare, my robes summer-thin. With her thumbs she brushed my braids; with her fists she crumpled my sleeves; with her mouth she insisted I was a fever dream.

When that was past, Lin told her tale. Her mother was a physician, away in the neighboring village. "I was fetching Mother. When I started off," she said defensively, "there wasn't yet a blizzard. My friend's sister got so ill. That's the only family Jia has got left."

What did I think? Only: gods were beginning to teach mortalkind the arts of hunting and making, the sciences of crafting and writing, while I stood aside, giving them nothing. Only: through her girlish glibness there was need, afraid of being heard but no less true for that.

"I will take you there," I said, and impelled by pride added, "for I haven't saved you only to see you rush to die in this weather. It would have been a waste of my time and investment."

"This is what near-death sounds like: my mother." Lin sniffed. "But thank you. I think."

We did not wait out the storm. In the aegis of my warmth she needed fear nothing of winter, and we raced along the snow. I tucked up my robes to keep pace, the winds like razors on my cheeks. They filled my ears with the beating of wings.

This was better than peace.

* * *

Dijun asked me to marry him, in my garden where I grew tiger lilies with stamens in gold, mandarins that crackled in the mouth, and starlings that thrived on graphite. My self, made old and sagacious by rage, would say: a crime committed against yourself to have so much, to love so much; had you made nothing, had you loved nothing, you would have had nothing to lose.

I was, then, turning my speculations to the sky. Not the one seen by mortals, whose every chi was charted and layered by celestial topography. Their sky had limits; mine, far above even the heavenly court, was endless and true.

Skies had nothing to do with what he talked about, which was what he always talked about. Finding a gap in human knowledge that other immortals hadn't yet filled—law-making, matrimony, poetry—and through that making a name for himself, earning worship and shrines, then a place in palace hierarchy. Between this he also recited poetry wonderfully and played music sweetly. So he interrupted both his own rhetoric and my thoughts when he pressed his mouth—hot as the bubbling lakes around us—to the inside of my wrist.

I looked at him, at my seized hand. "What?"

"I would," he said against my skin in a voice low and thick, "see you a bride."

His breath jolted my pulse as his words and gestures had not. It was so sharp, so singular; an arrow's pierce. Later I would think: was this meant, did he know? Of fire quickening fire, as oil in a lamp. A reaction without mind or thought and I was caught up in it, in the insistence of his mouth. "I—" I began, and stopped. My stomach roiled.

"I do not require your answer now, though I've long postponed this. Each day—" His choked hesitation, mirroring my own; for different reasons. "You overwhelm me."

Custom demanded that I respond. An appropriate answer to his question; surely one must exist in the cup of my skull, floating like tea leaves or hiding among the bottom dregs. Not until his leave-taking, graceful and correct, did it strike me there had been no question. Only a series of statements. The imprint of his lips stayed, my skin ridged red around it.

I wanted more than anything to seek another goddess' wisdom. How would I put forward to Xiwangmu, wedded empress, that I had been made uneasy; how to say that without losing some essential piece of myself, becoming an alien unwoman? I did not object to Dijun's lack of rank, so what misgivings did I have? Why would I not want a man this well-made, this adept in his bearing; a voice this rich, a hand this firm?

In search of clarity I descended.

Through piety and deed humans could join heaven, scoured clean of mortality; there were almost as many ways to achieve that as there were to fail. For beasts, the methods were different. For fish of jeweled scales there was the dragon's gate, an arch above the apex of great waterfalls over which they must leap. I had always liked watching these quests to transmute from fish to divine beast, from small bodies to sinuous muscle and horned head. Most did not clear the height, and fewer still arced over the roof.

The handful that did, one in a hundred-thousand thousand, emerged so incandescent that they filled me with certainty that a transformation awaited me; that someday I too would pass through my dragon's gate and become more than a goddess who did not know her way and purpose.

This certainty eased me into an answer for Dijun's non-questions: to see me in bridal dress he should be made to leap. Perhaps I would set him a wall so great, a cataract so fierce, that he would never leap high enough.

Enlisting a child spirit I sent him the message: I want a light in the night that sheds without heat, winged and strong, tame to me and fierce to all else, and when you have brought me this thing I will consent to be your wife.

At once he came to me and frowning asked, "This is not a riddle or a metaphor?"

I smiled at him; felt safe in doing so, in the impossibility of my demand. "I am being entirely literal."

His long lashes beat slowly as he regarded me. "That is a tall order."

"What treasure worth having is not purchased dear?"

Did I want to be purchased; did I want to be treasured? So thoughtlessly I gave that taunt. But he'd have risen to the task regardless, for the idea of marriage appealed to his need for recognition; it would secure his manhood and therefore his godhood. He might have a splendid mansion now, and all the knowledge he'd gathered, but what of that? All in heaven did. A goddess to wife gave him something to possess, something to master. This nebulous sense of having and achieving would grant him the beginning of status.

In days, so few and so short, he brought me the crane. It was garbed white, the color of death. It was crowned red, the color of weddings.

Dijun knelt to present his gift, not from humility but necessity; he was nearly as pale as its feathers, his eyes glittering above bloodless cheeks. "It fed from my arteries, to have light without heat."

I did not let on how well the bird pleased me; its beak like butchery, its talons like anger. Expectant, it stretched its long neck in my direction. "Is it to feed from mine also?"

"Then it would be no gift." His eyes fluttered shut and his head lowered, as though it could no longer bear the weight of being.

Weakness inspired if not tenderness then bravery. I would remember: I was the one who let him into my arms, I and no other. His head was heavy on my knee, his breath stuttery in my palm. Dijun was so breakable that I could have strangled him with my bare hands and exhumed his heart with my nails. Older, wiser Xihe would have done that and ended our misfortune before it could begin. She would have known he'd predicted me and laid down his fragility in my lap, an exquisite trap.

I was not old. I was not wise.

Night fell. We stood on my highest balcony, he and I. Having been satiated on my orchard the crane preened and did not fight when I cast it high. Its light burned silver-white and blotted out the stars. More beautiful to me, by far, than Dijun ever was or would be.

* * *

We did not immediately wed. There were dates to consider, auspices important even to us who were divine. Lacking mother, father, or older kin it was up to me to give myself away in marriage. I felt an accomplice to a robbery of my own home.

That was moot; on the day of my transition from goddess to bride my mansion dissolved to mist, to await shaping by the wishes of the next immortal granted this patch of land. As though that would be recompense, Xiwangmu invited me to her palace where cloud-girls dressed my hair in spirals, pinned it under a buyao heavy with fire opals, and draped my face with a silk veil the color of my lychees. The hue smoothed out the creases of my disquiet until I realized that I would be half-blind until Dijun lifted that trifling bit of cloth, his right as my groom. My own hands were not permitted such.

The cloud-girls assured me that I would be the envy of every goddess and Dijun the envy of every god.

Our nuptials were presided over by the emperor himself, beneath a sky of phoenixes and qilin. One table for gods, one for goddesses; both plied with nine courses of dishes that renewed themselves without cease. A celestial scribe stood in attendance, unspooling an endless scroll, his hand and brush a hummingbird blur to record my entry into the country of wifehood. Dijun held up my veil far enough for me to eat, feeding me pearl-dusted abalone, shed longma scales, iridescent shark fins. Our guests praised his diligence and husbandly virtue: not yet properly wed and already so adoring, so excellent! How fortunate I was, best-blessed of all brides.

He did finally lift that whisper of silk all the way, once my cloud-girls retinue and I arrived at his home.

Stepping over the threshold should have been my metamorphosis, sailing high over the cataract of ceremony and the roof of conjugal feast. It was not, and his home was nothing like mine. A garden easily as vast, with its own lakes; in place of fruits and trees stood obsidian, sculpted expertly—his own work, he murmured in my ear—but they did not move, did not grow. They would not taste sweet if they tasted of anything; they would cut my mouth, draw blood from gums until my palate understood only hurt.

In the enclosure of the marital bed we sat, sipping wine until the celebrants were done wishing us luck and fertility. I'd have liked to have seen more of his house, which he had built like a honeycomb hexagon by hexagon, hanging each wall with long scrolls of verse and proverb, lining each corner with black vases. We finished the last drops. It would have to wait. This night would be passed by means other than wandering from chamber to chamber, touching and admiring new things, meeting with his servants.

Dijun removed jewelry from my head and loosened my hair; each coil fell before him with a sigh. He peeled the complicated robes from me, fastidious as flaying, and when there was nothing more to expose he undid his own.

Seized with an urge for tidiness I gathered the clothes, folded them away on the round table at which we would share breakfast come morning. I caught a glimpse of my nakedness in a mirror, sheathed in nothing but the lingering warmth of his hands. His reflection watched me, and I watched it back—spousal scrutiny mine by right—examining the sweep of his eyebrows, the heavy fringe of his eyelashes, the sure lines of his jaw. I waited for them to ignite in me a reaction stronger than the remote pleasure of viewing an exceptional orchid bloom.

When I turned around, his patience had expired.

He panted into the crook of my neck, whispered flame into my breast, chanted my name into my belly. My hands sought purchase; knowing not what to do with them I arranged them on his sides, where under my fingertips his blood throbbed, an animal fighting to break loose from a net of ligaments. When he pressed me into the sheets my muscles coiled against the coming finality of our union, and I told myself: calm. There was delight to be found in the dictates and practices of desire. Set aside fear; it could not be so terrible.

And it was not. There were moments when his touches surprised, made me shudder from a sharp impersonal thrill. He did not cause me harm. But it obtained over the minutes a mechanical repetition that I soon found unbearable. I wanted to be done; I wanted to be gone. The longer it went, the less I felt like myself; to be opened like this, to be bared inside-out. The lamplight was as voracious as he, and neither left my skin with a secret to keep.

Above me Dijun shuddered, his mouth sealed against what I did not understand, his perfect face blank and slack. Sweat beaded on his brow and pattered onto me. I turned my cheek so it might not slip into my mouth. He bent to whisper in my ear, hoarse, that I was his.

When his rhythms had quieted and he lay as though one dead, I stepped out into his obsidian labyrinth to watch the crane that'd drunk from his veins and eaten from my hand. Under its light I revised my definition of contentment.

* * *

Lin was beating clothes against river rocks when I found her, side by side with another girl. The sight of me stopped her short, and she let the laundry drop slowly into the washing tub at her feet. She grabbed her friend's sleeve, yanking nearly hard enough to unbalance the other mortal and send them both tumbling into the river. "Jia. Jia! See? I told you I really did meet her."

"I see—oh." Jia's eyes were wide. I was not used to appraisal so direct. Even Dijun's had been circumspect, offered through the filter of his lowered lashes. "I thought you'd gone mad with fever when you told me you met a gorgeous maiden in the blizzard."

"I did not say she was gorgeous!" Lin elbowed her friend in the side.

"From the way you spoke it was obvious you thought she was." Jia grinned at me. "Which you are, if you don't mind me saying that."

"You are both mannerless," I said, though I did not mind. Her flattery was not like my husband's, given for no motive other than that she thought me pleasant to look upon. "You do realize I am of heaven?"

Lin put her hands on her hips. "I still don't believe that."

Her insolence surprised a laugh out of me. On the few occasions I had appeared before humans, none had ever questioned my divinity; one and all they had prostrated themselves in awe. I bent to the tub and exerted the mildest pulse. The waters rippled and in a moment were seething. "Well? I could boil an entire lake, but I don't do that to amuse a pair of rude country girls."

"An entire lake," Lin said with a wistful sigh. "To bathe in that during winter."

To which, Jia: "To see you bathing in that, winter or elsewise. You'll invite me, of course?"

At that the child I had saved from winter turned the hue of cherry blossoms. She flapped her hands at the cooling tub. "The steam."

Jia laughed, throaty, full of knowing. Though of mortal girls I comprehended near nothing, I could guess that they were not simply friends. "Are you sworn sisters?" I said when Jia had disappeared to fetch more dirty laundry. "Or lovers?"

"Aren't you blunt." Lin made a face in Jia's direction. "She's a lecher, a wanton, and if Mother knows... You don't think it strange or—or wrong, or impious, do you?"

"Why would I? Silly child."

She let out a breath long pent-up. "Good. So what've you been doing with yourself? It's been nearly two seasons." As though we were old friends, with years of climbing trees and mushroom-picking together on scraped knees and running downriver on bare fish-bitten feet.

Out of me, silence bled from the pinprick she'd made in my shell of empty words, empty acts.

"Did I say something wrong?"

"I've been marrying." For it seemed a process, not a finished result. The idea of its completion filled me with eager dread. "A god."

"Oh," Lin said. "I thought you might have chosen a goddess to wife. Well. I suppose that... that doesn't happen in heaven. It'd be ridiculous, wouldn't it? Should I offer congratulations? It's just you don't seem happy."

"I'm not unhappy." The lie curdled in my mouth. I longed to spit it out, but like all lies it congealed, stuck. "But I do wonder if I could have delayed the wedding."

"You could have told him 'No, you are ugly as a pig's rear.'"

"Out of all the gods he is the handsomest."

"Then, 'No, you are doltish as an ox.'"

"He is intelligent and learned in the scholarly pursuits." Scrolls in every chamber; all his servants were artists and poets, learning at his feet as he painted portraits of me, composed verses to my loveliness.

Lin's brows drew together. "Does he bore you in bed?"

"You ask too many questions. I suppose Jia does not ever bore you."

"She kisses like summer," Lin said and her gaze became distant, her mind turning fast on its wheels to secrets and embraces.

Did Dijun kiss like summer? I could not fathom what that even meant. "My husband is kind." All of heaven said so; lauded his devotion to me. Was even the emperor so good to Xiwangmu? "Daily he labors to please me."

"But you don't look pleased. He doesn't keep mistresses, does he?"

"We in heaven are above impulses so base." Yet I wished he was not. I stood and shook myself. Beyond Lin I could glimpse a being more paper than skin biding patiently under bamboo leaves. Its whiteless eyes peered at me. Dijun's creatures had perfected that art of reproaching me in my husband's place, without words. My throat tightened. "I should go."

"Already? I thought you might want to share a meal with us." Lin drew one of the trousers out from the tub and wrung it. The garment was faded; had never been white. Sideways she glanced, longing, at my robes. Her eyes lingered on the patterned bixi where plum blossoms flowered. "But you wouldn't want to do that anyway, I guess."

"It's not—" I caught myself. To be flustered before a mortal girl. "I have matters of import to attend to. I will come again, and next time... perhaps you and Jia will like something fine to wear. It doesn't do for me to be seen in such ragged company."

"Oh, you bite." Before I could step away, Lin flung her arms around me. She smelled of sweat, youth, and rice. "Do come back. Jia and I will cook for you. It won't be as amazing as anything you eat up there, but it'll be our best."

A few hours later, when I was safely ensconced in heaven, the sky fell and flood claimed the mortal lands.

* * *

His servants gave me such obeisance, fit for an empress. There is no corner in his house, no path in his garden, where I might walk without the rustling of paper robes and paper caps as spirits of lutes and zithers cast themselves low before me. An inkstone that'd gained soul and thought would kiss the tip of my slipper, its muzzle pebble-smooth and cold. None of them ever spoke; across their vests was the word silence. Dijun treasured quiet.

I shattered that when I strode into his study, where he sat at his writing desk bent over loose papers, jade tablets, and clusters of threaded coins. "Husband," I said, "why did you have your servant fetch me?"

He looked up, vexation warping his features. Quickly gone; a veil slid shut over that and he was flawless again, as sweet-seeming as he'd been that day by the Huang He. "Xihe! To celebrate—though each time I see you it is a celebration unto itself. Come, see these. I've presented them to the emperor and he was most pleased. A work in progress, these divination charts, but I predicted the flood to the hour."

A fine trembling began deep in my liver. "You knew this would happen?"

"Of course, that's why I sent for you. The cause is still to be determined, a dragon in its death throes perhaps, or two uncouth quarreling gods." He motioned with his hand, elegant dismissal. "It is beside the point. My labors have caught His Majesty's interest. At last I may be granted domain, monarch in my own right, and that will elevate you too, my wife. Doesn't that charm you?"

"Why did you—" If I retched I would disgrace myself. "I was there, I could have saved mortals. The flood's only water. At a thought I could've vaporized it."

Dijun gazed at me, smiled; gentle amusement. "Xihe, you could not have. The flame in you is splendid, but it has limits. Other gods have given succor to mortals. Don't trouble yourself with it, and I wouldn't want to see you strain yourself unnecessarily. You are too young."

"I could have—" And now I sounded as petulant as he'd made me out to be; I could not have sounded otherwise. He'd done it so neatly, my husband; reducing me to a child.

It was the shattering of a heavenly pillar. I heard it even up here, the howl of its breaking, the scream of its fall. The flood that'd burst through had drowned the sun; so swift and total that all had been washed away, whether dragon corpse or furious deities strangling one another all the way to the depths. Those that could had saved entire villages and towns through sudden relocations of desert, patches of hill, and walls of earth.

His Majesty summoned immortals to deliberate on the matter of restoring order. I did not attend; Dijun would have persuaded me not to in any case. Instead I sought out mortal survivors. Xiwangmu had in her graciousness sheltered some at her palace, and there were so many that even the vast compound attained the grimy busyness of the densest mortal towns. Memory of heaven would be sieved out of them afterward through a mesh of fine but specific foods: delicacies found nowhere on earth, herbs like emeralds grown to bring forgetting.

My observation of the mortal world had always been at a distance; I'd never been this close to this much humanity. The empress' servants had dressed them in clean clothes, had given them filling meals, but still they clutched each other. None made eye contact with me. They hid when they could, and pressed their foreheads to grass or floor tiles when they could not.

Neither Lin nor Jia was here. They'd been by a river. Floods, even mundane ones, were not things mortals could outrun.

Cloud-girls, the very same who had dressed me a bride, greeted me and informed me that Xiwangmu was occupied with assigning goddesses and acolytes to finding space for the survivors; to seeking out those still stranded on earth. I wanted to ask why I hadn't been sent for, why I hadn't been included. Shame thickened my mouth. Unable to speak past it I allowed them to lead me to an isolated pavilion, away from the refugees; away from anything that mattered.

They sat me down among blue lotuses; they held up tresses of my hair, exclaiming at the softness and luster. Covering me in their raindrop-beaded braids they mistook my quiet for wifely pining. "He will soon be with you, goddess." "Doubtless he thinks of you every moment." "No man may turn his gaze from loveliness like yours."

I would have laughed in their ice-tipped faces. I would have sharpened my scorn and with it dissolved them to wisps of fog, two cupfuls of water. "You find me pleasing, then."

"More than pleasing, wondrous Xihe. Oh, if you weren't made as you are, prone to scorch us with your divinity..."

"...in throes of passion, we would clasp you between us and show you, for all that you are a wedded wife. We can keep secrets, as we keep rain and thunder, storms and lightning, within our bellies."

"I won't harm you."

They glanced at each other, challenging; one knee-walked forward. I bent, obliging, and she took my face in cool hands, pressing sunset lips to mine. I waited, wanted, for it to stir me in some way. It should have. Why wasn't it? Her waist like a wasp's, her eyes more enchanting than my husband's, her kiss inviting. In the end, awkward, I thanked her and prevailed upon them to bring me stationery. They got me the best, but if they had put before me uncured hide and a rusty knife with which to carve upon it I would not have cared.

So long and closely I had guarded the thought of this behind my teeth, concealed it deep between the ventricles of my heart, that when I began to draw the chariot it startled me how solid it was, how sleek its shape and lines. Here the dragons would be yoked. There I would sit, the reins taut in my hands. I'd fly so fast, so far. None would keep pace with me.

Once the ink dried I rolled the paper tight, as small as it could get, and clutched it to me as I returned to Dijun's mansion. Calling the crane I brought it to the corner where my orchard tried to grow. So few of my trees and bushes would thrive on Dijun's land, but the handful that did I nursed with all my strength. The flowers and fruits were so prone to bursting into flames that his servants did not dare approach them, for their garments caught easily and my husband disdained slovenliness. I wedged the scroll in the crevice of an orange tree and bade it seal shut.

His courting gift had grown so large it no longer fit in my arms, but it tried to nest there, nuzzling me for warmth as I fed it the ripest of what I had. Stroking its back I wondered if in a thousand years it might learn thought and woman form. Or even sooner; the crane had had an unconventional provenance. Then I would have a companion, a mercurial girl with yellow irises and crimson eyelids, robed all in white. I smiled into the crane's feathers, which smelled of tangerines. Perhaps it would be like having a daughter of my own. "Would you like that?" I murmured. She would fly with me, and unless she wanted to I would never make her wed. My crane-child.

Dijun came back from the palace exuberant. He did not pass the details to me, but once he'd dismissed the servants he pulled me against him, clasping his mouth to mine. He tasted of victory; his tongue fed me loss.

Each time I would turn tense then uncoil in stages, yielding into softness that he'd take for desire. He would suckle at my breast while I thought of flight and limitless skies. A tedious chore to get through; nothing more. I had even learned to gasp and tremble, for I did not want to face again the anxious brittle questions—Do I not please you? which hid What is it that you think of; has another man caught your eye? So learned and lovely, my husband; yet so afraid that I would slip loose of his arms, dance free of his house.

The crane snapped forward. Dijun jerked away. His blood, viscous-hot, dripped from the crane's beak.

"Ah," he said, holding his hand away from his silks. "Tame to you, fierce to all else; my gift to you has been most perfect to your tastes."

Sourness rolled over my tongue, the first stepping-stone on the path of silence; silence as he spoke and drew me into a trap where I could not breathe, could not be heard. I tried. Oh, my older self, my mother-self, I tried. "It was born of your blood."

"But shaped by your request." His edged regard grazed over my skin, fine and honed, and my stomach clenched; had he felt in me that disinterest so near to unwant? Then he chuckled, loudly false. "Let it be. It is nothing. Shall we dine together? Matters of court have kept me so occupied and I've missed you, in all ways."

In his presence even celestial repast turned to dust in the mouth.

* * *

Once, Dijun incinerated three of his servants for having mislaid his tablets. Spirits with origin in instruments were made of wood; remained wood, bamboo, and camphor. Soon they became ashes and scented smoke. I did not love them, I would never care for them. Yet I knew it was the fear of him that made them dog my steps, report my every move to him in scrolls left by his desk at dusk.

One morning I summoned them and showed them fire. "I will be in my garden," I told them, "to tend my plants. I will not have moved, gone anywhere, spoken with anyone. Do you understand?"

They looked at one another, at me.

It was so easy for courage, or cowardice, to fruit cruelty. Discarding Dijun's lessons of control and restraint I opened my hand. Blue heat ambered; paled to white. Soundless even now, they shrank away. "Are you mute? Have you no language? Answer me!"

I singed and seared them. And they finally spoke with throats meant for music, with voices meant to be heard: every word a note, all of them together a song. They said yes. They called me mistress. They swore obedience.

Mount Kunlun reared high enough to elude submersion. I did not entertain illusions; others would have already combed every shadowed pool for mortals. Were Jia and Lin alive, they would have been found. Even so I searched, rattling the minutes in the abacus of my skull, tallying them into the hours I had until Dijun returned home.

The fish-kite was a yellow slash in the sky's watery murk, whipping at the end of a tether wind-pulled taut. I followed it, and thereby discovered the twins.

They genuflected in a fall of bronze headdresses and rustling scales and introduced themselves as Nuwa and Fuxi. They orated and moved in perfect harmony; smiled simultaneously, perpetually at peace in their oneness. Sister-brother, wife-husband, sharing a single snake tail that served as stomach and tool of perambulation.

Sheltered in their immense coils, Lin and Jia lay asleep. "We have put them to dreams," Nuwa said; Fuxi continued, "full of easy prey and quiet so they would not alarm and flee. We smelled a goddess on them and have kept them safe. Are they for you?"

"They... are." I risked touching their scales. "What are you?"

"We are of a kind." "Disaster has ever been our domain, and it came to us that we are wise to mending the heaven-breach, of restoring mortalkind to this earth. This we would set to for a little boon. Will you grant us this, or bring us to one who may?"

It wasn't for me to grant anything, and they were so large that I could not imagine carrying them back to heaven, let alone with two mortal girls. We managed by and by, and I directed them to Xiwangmu—she had authority I did not, and I wanted least to be given credit for Nuwa and Fuxi. Dijun would never forgive it. Lin and Jia I entrusted to Guanyin. Under my husband's gaze, I was not myself, not my own. The girls, who knew themselves so well, did not need to witness that.

The twins wanted permission to marry. To his credit—or some said discredit—the emperor swiftly gave them that, so long that they did not procreate. They accepted that clause serenely, and set to baking clay that would become humans full-grown: no need for infancy and childhood, no want for the slow process of pregnancy. Fuxi took up my husband's charts and made them fit for mortals so they might predict and avoid the next calamity. Nuwa sheared off the tip of their shared tail, which in aplomb grew into a second snake, black on gold. This creature she coaxed to fill the roaring gulf the broken pillar had left. In days it hardened, scabbing over that wound in heaven's sea.

There remained only the matter of the extinguished sun.

The shape of Dijun's thought on this became evident when he reminded me that in both of us an illimitable flame burned, that we had a duty, and did I not miss our courtship? I avoided him. I considered cuckolding him so he would cast me aside. It would be scarce challenge to find a fisher boy, seduce him, and rut with him, if the idea did not clog my throat with disgust. Dijun excited me little enough; other men interested me even less. Had the cloud-girl inspired some want in me, some longing at all, I would have invited her into my bed and flaunted her before my husband.

I heard that he laid down the rules and ceremony of nuptials for mortals new-made, in the fashion of our own wedding: the veil, the sacred husbandly lifting, the loosening of hair. Man and wife.

But those days softened from desperate to bearable through the liberty I had purchased with wrath. My wanderings were not half so blithe as they had been in my maiden days, but it was good all the same to step free, even under this sky. The flood abated by degrees. At the foot of Kunlun muddy mounds, once huts, began to emerge. A lonely pagoda finial; the head of a statue. I went to the empty place where my house had once stood. I could not transmute it to what it had been; to do so required having one's name registered to that plot on heaven's census, and mine was appended to Dijun's now.

Then came a night when I could not find the crane. This had never happened; it—she—had learned the routine so well, like breathing, like flight. My husband to my relief was absent, which gave me free reign to question the servants. But this time, however I threatened, none of them would answer in words, holding in their collective silence as though it could shield them from my anger. One pointed, paper sleeve charred by my hand, toward the obsidian maze.

On black pavement I found the crane, limp and still. Every bone in her wings had been broken. Dijun was slight, never a warrior, but I'd felt how unhesitating his grip could be, and bird bones were so fragile.

I did not waste tears. From each branch and bramble in my orchard I stripped orchids and okra, lilies and lychees, sunflowers and starfruits. Hands trembling I fed the crane. Her bones did not mend; her ligaments did not knit. When she had swallowed every fragrant and hot thing, she shuddered: a spasm of gullet and shattered pinions. From her beaks ten black pearls fell into my hand.

She laid her long neck across my knee, for mercy. I gave her that. Once she had gone cold, I flung her up into the sky one last time. Her body, if not spirit, would remember the way.

The pearls I spilled into a silk pouch, which I tied shut and slipped into my robe. I had seen Nuwa make life from craft and memory, children without mating. I knew what I had to do.

* * *

Under blackness crane-corpse lit, I entered His Majesty's palace. It had many gates, many walls, tiered one over another and bisected by a stair that did not end.

Guards in stone and lamellar barred my way. I melted the metal on their glaives, burned black marks into their armor. A storm of twenty wings and thirty taloned feet passed through them, and they gave way.

My wish had been for: impervious, aloof, untouchable. My reality, when I reached the throne room, was one of breathlessness and trembling knees. Kneel and I would have snapped; kneel and I would have fallen, to such depths that no godhood or fire could have saved me. I remained therefore standing. The crows hid my terror, scarlet beaks and dark eyes holding close to me as a shield. My own court. Arrogance, then, would serve me.

The few immortals in attendance pinned me with their scrutiny. Behind him the emperor's throne hissed, scales rustling, claws unsheathing. His Majesty quieted both throne and gods with a motion. "Xihe, we have long missed your grace and company, though we did not expect the size and unusual nature of your entourage."

To ground myself I ought to have murmured ritual greetings, every respectful phrase. All that tumbled out of me was, "Majesty, I have an answer to the question of bringing back daylight."

A sharp intake of breath, by whose cadence and pitch I recognized as my husband's.

"Might we see a demonstration?"

"Outside, Your Majesty. I would not wish to ruin the roof."

Gravely he led; royal body, royal head: the limbs of the court must perforce follow. My husband among them; my beautiful husband with his traps at the ready, his snares snapping after my heels. I did not look at him, would not look at him. My voice would not be taken; my courage would not be shaken. The crows moved with me and there I took refuge.

In the courtyard I whispered to one of the crows perching on my shoulder. He leaped into the night, strong as summer morning, and blazed. The emperor shielded his eyes with his sleeve. Courtiers drew back from the stab of midday heat. Dijun had gone utter white.

The emperor gave a contemplative nod. "How did you come by them?"

"They are the sons of my flesh and my husband's blood." I did not tell them I had given birth through my eyes. Feathers slick, leaving me like tears. Cartilage passing through my lashes to harden on the other side; blood-brooks on my cheeks. I smiled slowly. "My children, Your Majesty, every last one of them."

Dijun's proximity rippled against my skin. He would claim us all, wife and progeny, and we would return to his mansion, where in his hexagonal rooms my path would wind around itself until the only way was back. There he would part my thighs and with a kiss murmur, More sons, most precious of wives. "I will want an engineer to help me build a chariot. In this my sons and I will ride, bringing day to mortals and heavens alike. We will glide high and in this way avoid all earthly frights. No flood will ever again cause winter unending or night everlasting."

Dijun fell back. He could not object; could not admit he'd been told none of this, that this plan was none of his, that he did not know his wife. The shame would fall on us both but on him hardest for being unable to master me, inkstaining indelibly what he thought the pellucid waters of his honor. I had strangled his words in the crib of his throat. I had given back the silence he'd forced into me with his mouth.

This was my moment of becoming, and I savored it, every bite, more potent than the best of my orchard.

Taming mounts was no difficulty. Carps newly reborn were docile, and drawn to my power they would acquiesce to anything. With them pulling the chariot I brought Lin and Jia to an inland town where survivors—not Nuwa's clay offspring—had gathered to try again and heal. Fuxi and Dijun had laid down the customs of marriage, man to wife, but this small corner I claimed for myself; wife and wife would live without reproach. I visited them often.

My sons grew in bounds, greedy in their eating, until they stood as tall as I. Soon I had to fly with only one of them at a time, for together their joy would crisp and cook the earth to ashes. After the first three dawns they began to speak, a jabbering chorus of Mother! Their first utterance, their first reality. On the easternmost shore, beyond gods and humans, I nursed a tree to grand heights, mulberries like embers on its boughs and leaves that would cut to pieces anyone other than us. Each sunset I watched my crow-children sleep on the branches.

My sons' laughter was music, and they knew no sorrow.

* * *

It was long after the end, and out of ten sons only one remained to me, the last, the youngest; here approached the part of my story which is known best.

Even then it was such a quiet, submerged part. Mortals learned the legend of how ten sun-crows rose and terrorized the earth with their fatal light, how heroic Houyi—heaven's best marksman, Dijun's champion—shot them down. Xihe went barely mentioned: the suns' mother, nothing more, for the function of giving them birth must be fulfilled by some vessel.

I'd told my sons of what Dijun had done to me, to the one who preceded them as my child of the heart, but they were sons, not daughters: a gulf no motherhood could cross. They wanted only to be a family. In the end I could not impose my hate upon them, for I wished their existences unmarred; I wanted them steeped in bliss. They were only mortal. Few realized that they were not divine, inheriting neither Dijun's agelessness nor mine. They would pass, and some other way would have to be devised to light the world.

Dijun told them: I sometimes long for a fancy to see the sky subsumed by your wings. The brilliance of you all together, for heaven and earth to behold.

My sons had been uncomplicated creatures. Born to be loved. If their father expected a little gesture to earn his, why then, they would gladly give it.

The feathers of my youngest were growing rime, aging before their time. Absorbing the work of his brothers was more than he was made for, and in time he would fade. It was terrible for a mother to mourn her children—but when my offspring was mortal and I was not, what was to be done? Life was change.

He fell asleep, my last son. In the sky a dead crane drifted.

A footfall; a radiance. "Xihe."

"You ever visit uninvited, husband," I said without looking at him. "It seems you do not understand the meaning of unwelcome."

"You were a delight once."

"These days I'm rather delighted with myself." I turned my attention to scrubbing one of my dragons' necks. "Heavenly etiquette is all that stands between you and the event of your eyes being pulped between my dragon's teeth. I'd personally gouge them out with my thumbs. Since our wedding night I've longed to do this."

His robes rustled as he backed out of the dragon's reach. "You would not. And could not."

I looked down at my arms, at muscles hardened over centuries. "How precious that you think so."

"In celestial census we remain spouses, Xihe. What would befall you if you attempted to murder your own husband?" He drew closer. "And witness what has transpired after you left me. Your sons dead. You cannot govern yourself, much less them. One child is all you have left to live for."

I could not keep from laughing. "That's what you think?" I stepped into the chariot and tugged the reins. The paired dragons arched and reared. "I live for myself, Dijun. For that I have been made; for that I have been born—for myself, not for you, not even for my sons."

Life was change, and not even the mother of suns would forever stay the same. The limitless skies opened for me. Into them I soared, flames pouring out of me in a roar, a dragon's gate carved into the night.

Mine alone to leap.

Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon

It is the aftermath of the world's end, and nine birds–nine suns–lie dead while Houyi cradles the curve of her bow, her fingers locking around the taut hardness of its string. The tenth sun, the last, has fled. Chastise them, Dijun said, a father's plea. But there is the land and the horror and the dryness, desiccated corpses in empty dust trenches that were rivers not long ago. There are dead dragons, too, and snake women with bright eyes–and is it not right to bring down the suns, is it not what Houyi is meant to do? She is a god who protects; she is a god given a duty.

The birds are dead. They no longer burn, but the places where they have fallen will long after be black scorch marks, indelible. There will be consequences. It does not matter that her first shot meant to warn: wing clipped, the eldest sun plunged and shattered on the earth. Seeing their brother fall they attacked, and she had to defend herself.

Behind her Chang'e is inhaling and exhaling shallow scraps of air. They will not let this pass. What will you do now? Where will we go?

And the archer whispers, I saved them all.

She knows, as she has known since she notched that first of nine arrows–even in the firestorm of their rage she was a peerless shot, one arrow per bird all she needed–that for her there will be no thanks. They have transgressed enough, wife and wife, and this shall be the final insult tolerated.

So Houyi only takes Chang'e's hand and says, I am sorry.

Night comes, and with it the first drops of rain. Somewhere a dragon king or queen serpent stirs and tastes the air with a forked tongue. The Sea Mother sifts sand out of her eyes, which have been so parched, so dry. Out of their bellies and mouths rivers will surge forth, tides will rise bright-green with brine, and the world can go on as it did before the convening of ten triple-legged suns. This is their duty, as the murder of sun-crows has been hers.

* * *

Houyi sometimes thought she might have been mortal. But all she remembered was the bow and slivers of wind which she soon learned to pin to wood with arrowheads. Neither mother nor father commanded her early recall.

Easily enough she was accepted under the jade roof, for new yearly new deities swelled the court. When the time came to instate her, some consternation arose. What she was, ought to be, seemed evident from the divine weapon and quiver on her back. Whether she should be titled accordingly was a matter of debate.Archer-God denoted a militarial register: should she be appointed general, marshal, or captain in the bargain as other deities of similar associations were? Wasn't there a young man from the realm below, skilled with the same weapon? Houyi could perform as his follower, his hunter, and she could keep the bow.

In the end Meng, who attended court rarely and spoke up less, pointed out the obvious solution. Let the god-to-be compete with the boy and decide thereby which deserved the title. The boy was summoned, Houyi matter-of-fact defeated him, and that settled the matter. Out of respect forMeng–who had abandoned gleaming nacre and ever-blooming gardens, and agreed to a duty of doling out oblivion in hell–the emperor did not gainsay the result, and out of fear too that the Old Woman of Forgetting might leave her hell-post in pique. Few were suited to it, fewer still willing. Brewing amnesia had become a woman's work: no male of his court would stoop to it, and no goddess would leave the hard-won comforts of paradise.

Houyi became the divinity within the sacred instant between tautness and letting fly. But she remained merely Houyi the Archer. The army's marksman division continued headless, making do with reporting to the artillery chief, whose main passion was vested in ballistae and who had little appreciation for the finesse of arrows.

All agreed, however, that the engineer's eccentricities and injustices were preferable to Houyi. She endured this as she would endure other slights in the knowledge that she stood one excuse away from demotion. The archer might be new to celestial ways, but she'd seen how other women acted–the wives, the mothers, the sisters–and how they were acted toward: no fault of theirs, but it was a strict and narrow path they walked. Houyiwas nothing if not a quick study.

"And where might I live, Your Majesty?" she asked of the emperor, kneeling in her men's clothes.

An absence of answer from the man on the throne. He didn't appear young, the emperor, though he took care to look in his prime: oiled hair, oiled mustache, earlobes lengthened to denote wisdom. A crown that dripped sapphires orange, blue, green.. "It'll have to wait," he said imprecisely, "for the masons need to rebuild the palace wings Dijun's crow-sons burned down. They were most enthusiastic their last visit to our court, but who may deny a father his sons?"

"Yes, Majesty."

She descended to the earth, passing through storms and sky-lakes, and sought out lairs of great beasts. One tiger, of some nine centuries in age and known for his cunning, fell to her after seven nights and seven days of tracking and trapping. An angry typhoon, manifesting in a litter of foxes joined to one mind, surrendered its flesh to her after she'd pierced the hearts of its bodies one by one. Her fame grew, almost incidentally, in the demons' realms.

It couldn't be helped that she was seen by mortals and that they began to chronicle her, imagining for her an origin rooted in one of their own. In one province they said she was a warrior hermit; in another they insisted she was the son of a goatherd, and in the capital they linked her to the royal lineage, calling her a prince.

Houyi considered correcting them, but she was busy drawing up the plans of her house. In any case the hearts of mortals were obedient. When she appeared to scholars in person, she was certain, they would immediately rewrite their manuscripts to match the facts of her existence. Academics must be empirical, or else what were they for?

She made the pillars of her home out of tiger femurs. The roof was the ribs of foxes, delicately strong, and the lattices of her windows were the finest in heaven, put together from the bones of immense sharks that feasted on the flesh of fishermen. Hardened feathers and scales of demonic owls and lizards became the tiles on her roof. Her methods of construction were barbaric, but when the house was completed few were able to say it was not exquisite. Her deeds, too, secured her position. Was it intended? None could tell, for she was indifferent to all–the praises more grudging than respect, her own skill, her effortless slaying of wicked spirits–and kept her thoughts hid and close.

The emperor was said to pay her a personal visit, telling her, "This is most excellent work."

"I'm honored, Majesty."

"You could consider the office of our chief architect. Building and making are the noblest of arts, the most dependable of sciences. We need nobility and dependability, Houyi. For look: many of the court are happy to range abroad and subjugate heaven's enemies, yet when we call for solidity and wisdom, who provide but a rare handful?"

"Demons," Houyi was reported to have said, "require killing, Majesty. It's a fact that they are fecund and breed without need or care for the natural process of things. Quell one and five more rise to replace it, springing full-grown out of filth and mud."

"That is a truth."

"I am grateful, Majesty, that you thought me fit for a post so exalted. But while the matter of masonry and the laying of pillars may wait, the multiplying of devils can only be regulated through hard labor and vigilance. I give myself to this work so that another may enjoy the privilege and comforts of being your chief architect."

And perhaps the emperor smiled behind his sleeve, half in chagrin. It might be that he took her answer for insolence and that it would explain what transpired in the following years. For the time being, he merely left her be in her house of bone and fur and scales. She cupped her hand over her fist and bowed to him as he departed.

The suitors started then. Houyi couldn't pinpoint why men suddenly took up the fashion of wooing her, nor where the idea had started and caught hold of them like fire on dry grass.

First Xuanwu, a monarch in his own right, riding to her home astride the snake that had been his guts, the turtle that had been his stomach. He'd made himself young for her, donning a skin luminous as pearls and robes redder than wounds. Houyi did not receive him beneath her window: instead she took him to a howling gulf between two cloud-cliffs, where she honed herself by shooting sunlight, separating each beam into seven colors. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth rainbows she asked, "Why is it that you want a wife?"

On the turtle's back he sat, placid; no marksman himself, he was content to watch and admire. "In my mortal years I never wedded."

"That seems a fair enough rationale," she allowed. "But I don't think I will suit your court."

"It is small, true, and solemn. Still I am a martial being and we ought to complement. I shall have your bow done over in hematite, and your arrows tipped in black diamonds. In your lap furs and feathers and scales shall be piled high, dyed black and obsidian-beaded. You shall be queen over the north, feared for your wisdom and prowess. As my wife you may hunt as many evil spirits as you like and, in the sunless hours, pour their blood into the rivers of my domain."

"That's most generous, Xuanwu, for a husband." She didn't mention that hematite was not much good to grip and that diamond arrowheads would defeat the point of her practice. "Yet I'm few in years and have not had examples: I do not know how to be a wife, much less a queen. I've a love for bright colors besides, which is why I've made my house as I did. Will you allow me to remake your palace? I'll be most careful, papering the walls with the eyes of wolves and the bellies of peacocks, making lamps out of deep-sea beryls, draperies out of sunset skies. That is my requirement, Xuanwu, for what wife may tolerate a house not done in substances and style to her desires?"

He admitted that, certainly, a wife had every right on that matter; he also admitted he wasn't willing to compromise, for he found the brightness she enjoyed distracting. They parted on good terms, over what was–or what he was led to think was–a philosophical difference.

Marshal Tianpeng, after that. He visited her drunk, as was his wont, gourd clasped under one arm. His fondness for women was legendary: if this one dressed more like one of his soldiers than the girls he chased, he readily discounted that. "For," he roared, "what's existence that does not vary? Boring, that's what. Come with me, Houyi, and I'll dig you a lake filled with the best wine. I'm a builder too, and have a deft hand with carpentry. I will take apart my abode and you may do it over, in any color and material you like. How is that?"

"Most magnanimous," she was reported to have said.

"All I ask, lovely Houyi, is that once in a while you wear soft silks and hairpins. Oh, not much, not often–but perhaps one day out of a year, or even five? The rest of the months and hours are yours. You can practice with my men, if you like, to show them just why it is you are named heaven's best archer and feared by all the wicked."

The archer sipped the wine he'd poured her. "That sounds very well, Marshal. Then on those days you will also wear soft silks, hairpins, maybe even bangles on your wrists?"

Tianpeng paused his drinking. "What?"

"It is both your custom and mine to dress martially, and you wish me to spend a few days every year changed. Therefore it seems logical that on those same days you will alter yours so that we can be well-matched. It's not orderly otherwise, and as wife and husband we'll be subjected to ridicule. Or so I gather, being yet new to existence and not tutored in the ways of our kind."

He stared into his gourd for a long time. Upending it he found the last drop gone. "I'm not sure it works like that, Houyi."

"Why not, Marshal?"

In the end Tianpeng left to seek more liquor, more befuddled than angry, having spent an hour trying to expound on the logic of garments and the attributes of matrimony. His own rhetoric turned around to gulp him whole, for he'd never been scholarly. He wrote the archer off as a lost cause. Other girls were abundant, more voluptuous and pliable than she. Also, most womencomprehended clothes.

Others followed, half-hearted attempts to make a bride out of Houyi. Not from any real yearning, she realized, but because she must be placed somehow, being fatherless, brotherless, unmarried, and not motherly in any way. But the tide ebbed. No mortal origin in her, so perhaps she was not dissimilar to Guanyin: meant to be celibate. The white goddess had even been known to take on a masculine aspect.

The suns' father alone did not relent. Dijun watched her and sometimes they encountered one another at court, exchanging passing words and obligatory greetings. He had his avian sons, who lit the world with their heat, track her when she left the safety of celestial confines–to kill, to find new and sharp things with which to make arrows, to collect sounds and smells in her bowstring. Houyi did not require help and, with the wariness of a born hunter, knew when the presiding sun monitored her from his mother's chariot. Infidelity in the hatching, and abetted unwittingly by Dijun'sown wife. She contemplated telling Xihe of this, but found no opportunity. The suns' mother was remote, rejoicing only in her distance and abhorring any society not her sons'. And though Houyi was fearless, she could not fly so high, nor endure the birds' fire.

She prepared herself, close-lipped, for one last courtship.

He came to her armed in the glory of himself, whose seed had made possible the winged conflagrations that were his sons, whose incandescence had captured aloof Xihe for ten fleeting moments. Even the emperor was not so resplendent: Dijun was gold of skin and mouth, and flame threaded through his hair and the fabric of his robe. When he found her, he knelt as though she was empress, as though she were not merely an archer.

Houyi tried not to cringe from the heat. She grimaced, in that subtle way she'd mastered, with only the crinkling of her eyes and the slightest shift in the angle of her brows. To most it did not show; to Dijun, clothed in brilliance, it was invisible.

"I have long admired your grace," he began.

"You do not have to kneel," she interrupted.

"I wish to submit and supplicate–to tell you that of you I will ask nothing, no silk or hairpin, no surrendering of your bow, no parting with your house. I will come to yours, if you will have me, and sleep where you point. I do not offer you jewels, for I know you crave none. I give myself and beg you to accept."

The archer glanced skyward. "You have a wife."

"Xihe and I had children to give humans life. We had children because we were alone. We had children because fires burned within us that had to be birthed, given shape. There's ever been only duty, Houyi, and when my wife speaks it is only to our sons. They are her world; I am nothing."

"I cannot mother the crows, Dijun, nor chariot them to their ascent. I'm not made of such material that can withstand the edged branches ofFusang. I cannot give them my breast to rest their heads when they tire."

"You do not have to. Xihe loves her sons, and they will remain hers. I will forfeit her and forfeit my office. It will be my contentment simply to be yours, my peace to know your embrace." Dijun opened his hands, and flame like molten gold fell, scorching the bones with which Houyi had paved her garden paths. "Please."

She knew there would be consequences. She knew Dijun could not be crossed. She knew he could not be deterred, or brushed off, or misled. In the face of all this, she pulled him to his feet–she was strong–and said, "No."

He looked at her, eye to eye. They were of a height, mandated to be tall. "Why?"

"Because," she said very softly, "I do not wish to be your wife. This is not due to any shortcoming of yours, nor mine. I simply do not wish this, and ask that you seek elsewhere for a bride."

In silence, Dijun gazed at her. In silence, Dijun took leave.

* * *

On the day Houyi returns to face judgment the court is gravid with the weight of immortals from every rank, celestial and ascendant, sage and disciple, even half-mortal apprentices. Divine beasts wind themselves around palace pillars, lending the gleam of their scales and seven-hued wings to the polish of everlasting wood. They shy away from Houyi, remembering well how she loves to adorn her quiver and house.

Today she does not see them. Grime and red sand cling to archer and mortal woman; they leave dirty footprints wet with the blood of birds, fringed with feathers and ashes. Though Houyi moves with the same grace she always has, and Chang'e with the same light steps, nothing in them is seemly. The archer tastes dust in her mouth, and death of shriveling and peeling, of flesh thinned to paper. Here the air is cool and sweet, the lakes fresh and full. Ten suns rose; nine fell before their scorching blast could reach these lands.

They kneel, wife and wife, before their monarch.

Who speaks. It was ill-done, Houyi.

Yes, Majesty.

He gives sentence. Her bow will be taken from her: quiver, arrows, string. She will be Houyi the Archer no longer but must take on another name, after which a goddess will take charge of her, to instruct her in the worth of wisdom and forbearance. On these qualities she must contemplate. In a few centuries, should she be deemed adequate, she may be restored to her former station.

Chang'e is widening her eyes, angry. Even so she recognizes that this may be borne. It could have been terrible and final, and it is not. She touches her wife, takes comfort, but Houyi remains wary. The archer knows predators and prey both.

Then: No, Majesty. No.

Distant Xihe, whose bare arms are muscled like an archer's from eons of charioteering and the weight of her children; aloof Xihe, who rides in the silence of the sky, above and beyond the emperor's regard. Where she walks the tiles blister. When she speaks the air sizzles. She does not kneel, and this breach of decorum draws forth a shuddering collective gasp. My sons, save one, are lost. I shall not suffer their murderer among our ranks, and if you decree that must be so, then I am quit of heavens. Better to seek refuge in the demons' nation, for there at least justice of a sort may be seized.

The emperor shakes his head, admonishment. Justice is not a series of strikes dealt back and forth. It is not a duel, a skirmish, a war. Justice is weighed on a scale, right against wrong, wrong against wrong. Your sons were not blameless and there must be an accounting. What's done is blood-hot, but righteous. Years of labor are ahead for all of us to repair and restore. The dragons shall weep until they bleed from their eyes to water the land. Who knows when the sea may brim again, may throng again with their thousand thousand lives?

She holds her head high, the mother of suns. I birthed them because I had to, and loved them in spite of that. They were children. They were only children.

Houyi is not a mother, does not intend ever to be. But she remembers that the crows soared and danced in the skies, and ignored her as children ignore interruptions to their play. She remembers their beauty and how their joy gripped her even as she brought down the eldest. They broke on a ground too cracked to cushion them, in lakes too empty to buoy their fall. They tried to burn her, but she fired the first shot; what else could they have done?

There is something in Xihe's magnificence that hurts her.

And Houyi rises, while Chang'e grips her wrist whispering, No, no, please no, Houyi. It's enough.

Majesty, she begins and Chang'e is trying not to cry, I did commit a wrong. Their deaths were at my hand. This too is a crime that must, on its own, be weighed.

My sentence has been given says the man on the throne. My word is final.

Xihe deserves better.

The emperor leans back into his vast, living throne, and when he exhales it is a long tumultuous sigh: like storms dying down. He looks from one goddess to one who will soon no longer be. Very well.

In the crowd, his flame swallowed, Dijun watches.

* * *

The feast nominally honored victory, but the palace thrived on a collective impulse for feasts, and any excuse would have done. Houyi ate with enthusiasm but drank sparingly, and chuckled at Marshal Tianpeng's loudness. When the dancers–girls not yet ascendants but disciples of goddesses–appeared to undulate and sing, the marshal's laughter crested to a rumbling that shook his table and his companions' seats.

She allowed herself a smile that did not show on her lips, and gave Xuanwu a polite nod as he passed by. The lion she had fought was many-headed and ferocious, and she'd put its whiskers into the wood of her bow for hardiness, its deep-throated growl for flexibility. More than the hunt, and very much more than the revelry, this had been her true delight.

The court had grown accustomed to her, too, and she was surprised that she enjoyed the company of goddesses. They shared stories; Houyihad few of her own, and was therefore interested best when Xiangu told her of her mortal years. "Not," the ascendant hastened to add, "that I had many of those."

"It is no shame," Houyi offered, "to have many or few. It is all experience and memory, wealth of the rarest and highest sort."

Xiangu flushed, laughing. "You have such ideas. Do you not believe then in enlightenment, the discarding of the self?"

"I have no opinion. Sometimes I think it would be good if I could be mortal for a few years, so I can see for myself what it is like and thereby decide whether purity suits me."

The goddess fell quiet. "You wouldn't."

"No?"

"Unless you can manifest as a man, you would hate such a life viciously." She laughed again, sour this time. "Being a woman in the realm of men is... not easy. Certainly it's not simple here, either, save perhaps for you and the great Guanyin. Yet even for me, for those dancers and serving girls, this is far better. This is the riches we dreamed of, this is the wealth and goodness."

Houyi frowned. She was not oblivious, and had an inkling of what Xiangu meant. In the abstract: she couldn't imagine the reality of it, the days and nights of living on earth. "Do you think I should consider taking a pupil? A mortal girl?"

"Yes! Oh, yes." Xiangu presses her fingers to her lips. "Do you notice, so many more boys than girls are raised to immortality? I was never really taken in as anyone's disciple. I had guidance, yes, but it's not the same as tutelage, which makes all the difference. You would have much to teach."

"I don't believe I do, in truth, but it is a thought."

A dash of ceramic on floor tiles. Houyi looked, found a servant standing over a ruin of shards and spilled soup. Her face pale, her eyes wide, and her lips taut over a cry that she had bitten in half.

The silence deafened, and filled Houyi's ears with endless ringing.

One of the goddesses hissed into that quiet, and rose to grip the servant by her arm, chastisement–threats–on the tip of her tongue. Grim-faced too, the goddess bowed and pushed the girl to bow with her. The mirrors she wore, armor-like, clinked. "Majesty. She is one of mine. I knew she would... I shall send her back to her parents."

Houyi stood. "My lord, might I beg for her pardon? It is a feast that honors my deed, and I wouldn't wish to see it marred by severity for a mishap so little."

The incident was small, and after all so was her request: the emperor granted it, as rich men granted trifles.

She did not dwell on the event or her part in it. So when the dining and performing were done, she did not expect to find a stranger waiting at her door. "I am Chang'e," the girl said, "and my mistress Tianmu bade me seek you and give you thanks for sparing Wenlan, the servant who disgraced herself at your feast."

"The feast wasn't truly mine. You are one of Tianmu's acolytes?"

The girl's smile was balanced on a precipice. "I should be so fortunate. No, I was brought here to serve; she doesn't accept followers. I haven't the fortitude or the talent even if she did. The Lady Tianmu has been most kind to me, even so."

Houyi opened her door. "Have you eaten?"

"I... haven't, no."

"I'm not much of a cook, but there are some buns I can steam, lotus seeds I can boil in syrup."

Chang'e shook her head. "I'm not meant to touch celestial food. I eat with other servants. I don't mean to be ungracious or ungrateful, only..."

"You are of earth?"

She looked down at the hem of her dress, a hint of color on her cheeks made gold by lantern light. "Yes. I serve. I haven't earned ascendance."

"I never had to earn it, technically," the archer mused. "Might there be a difference between divinity earned and divinity inborn? If you put it in a box, the shape of it, the texture? But come in. The lotuses didn't grow here. They are wild; I picked them while I was abroad. Unless you don't like sweet things? I can boil them in ginger instead. Or you could eat them as they are, but they aren't fresh anymore."

The girl gazed down, up, and down again. "With the syrup would be fine. More than fine. Or anything, really. Please. And thank you."

Chang'e waited as Houyi ignited the lamps and exhaled softly when she saw the house. Her fingers flowed over the porous tibia cross-sections, the chimeral overlap of mammal and reptile, the twisting curling horns that upheld the roof. When she ate the lotus seeds she did so reverent. "It tastes of home."

The archer ladled boiling water into the teapot, reasonably certain that rainwater wasn't beyond the strictures permitted to Chang'e. "Do you miss it? Your life?"

"Heaven is perfect beyond words. There's no hardship here, no starving. There was a dry season when I was young, and I remember my mother weeping as she goaded our one ox to plow the field, weeping over food that was not and would not be. Over the empty bowls, empty plates. But it was home." She splayed her fingers over sugared steam. "Though there's much I don't miss."

"Such as?"

"Being a daughter. Being a sister." Chang'e shook herself. "I didn't mean to waste your time with all this. It's unworthy of your attention. You are divine and I'm just–myself."

The archer poured tea. She'd put a pickled plum in each cup, a hint of spice and salt. "I would like to know, unless you'd rather speak of something else."

Reluctant, then freely, Chang'e spoke. Her childhood, in part, and many matters strange and new to Houyi. Playing in the river, trying and failing to spear fish with a sharpened stick, sleeping on a mat so thin it barely existed. Brothers came up in brief, sporadic mentions, creatures better valued than she was and who weren't afraid to let her know this was the case. Hot with tea she revealed, in fragments, the red bridal gown and red bridal veil; of how she'd fled both into a night choked with thunder and there was found by Tianmu.

Later, emptied of words long lidded, Chang'e drowsed and drifted off. The archer found her a bed and went to her own, thinking of the puzzles she'd learned and thinking, more than a little, of the girl who had taught them to her.

Houyi asked for and obtained Tianmu's reluctant permission to take Chang'e through sky and sea, and even to the demons' world. Though not unafraid, Chang'e trusted the archer and, laughing, would pet glittering eels in one of the dragon kings' homes. She asked Houyi to teach her to shoot, to cut, for they seemed to her useful things; lessons were given and Houyi made her a knife from the horn of an ox devil.

Once Chang'e pinched Houyi's cheek. "You should smile more. I've never seen you laugh."

"Neither have I."

"Does nothing amuse you? Bring you joy? It'd make you look so lovely." Chang'e reddened. "Not that you don't already."

They were standing underneath a tree whose trunk was silver, whose fruits were golden hands fringed with black petals at the wrists. Chang'eturned rigid, at first, when Houyi kissed her. Soon that changed, and when they were no longer breathing from one another's mouths, the archer drew back and softly laughed.

Chang'e stayed silent for a long time, her breath quivering in her throat. At length she spluttered, "Well I was right. You are beautiful. I don't know about what we just–" She tangled her fingers in the folds of her robes. "Though I would like to try it again. Maybe. Sometime. Sometime tomorrow. Oh and... I lied."

"Yes?"

"That Tianmu bade me seek you and thank you in her stead. Wenlan was to do it, but she was too shy and I took it upon myself. Without Lady Tianmu's leave. She reprimanded me for days and gave me twice my usual chores. But it was worth every scrubbed wok."

Outings followed, and more trees, and more words, during which Chang'e lost her awe of the god and gained in its place a wrenching want for the woman. It culminated in a visit to Guanyin, whom Houyi had a faint idea might be wise in this matter. The white goddess was seated at the edge of a river, attended by two children who would remain children in perpetuity. Guanyin did not acknowledge Houyi.

"Chang'e and I have decided we would wed. But she has misgivings and suggested I seek advice. Might you have any for us, great Guanyin?"

The goddess turned her attention from the waters. Fish that she'd been communing with dispersed, the children likewise. "My advice is to pursue it not, Houyi. It wouldn't be taken very well by heaven at large."

"I am a god," the archer said, unnecessarily. "I would think that'd give me liberty to marry whomever I please."

"Perhaps if you intend to become a man–that is doable, of course." Guanyin looked, for a moment, like someone else: clothed in yellow instead of her customary white, tall and bearded with bristling brows. "For the ceremony's duration at least and, for preference, several years afterward. So the idea would stick. Beyond that if you return to being a woman, why, that happens."

"I don't think I can, but even if I could, I feel no urge to become a man."

"Then," Guanyin said, flattening water reeds into neat rows, "I recommend against it. You will not be happy; neither will Chang'e."

The archer pursed and unpursed her lips. "There are gods with a taste for men."

"Oh yes, I know a dragon's son who has a great fancy for sun-beaten farmers. But that is... looked upon differently and in any case he doesn't mean to marry them. Wife and wife are unheard of and, as a rule, we are not fond of things too novel or strange. There are limits to what is permissible, archer, even for you–and your doings are more permissible than most. You do recognize that?"

"We could be less than open about it." Compromising.

Guanyin drew out a handful of water and molded it, sculpting it into a pagoda around the ribs she'd made with reeds. "Heaven is full of loose lips. One would think it ought to be otherwise, we being what we are, but there it is. Do you mean to persist in this?"

"Chang'e and I are in accord, yes."

"Then bring her and I will bless you both, though I don't believe it will do much good in the end. For that, archer, I am sorry. Even I may not protect everything."

Chang'e and Houyi wedded, with the same quiet of a mouse stealing through a room full of cats. But Guanyin was proven correct: secret became news. On her part the archer heard the beating of wings, and felt the heat of the sun as it slanted onto their ceremony–both of them in red, though veils, being redundant had been dispensed with–as though, for a moment, one of Dijun's sons was gazing down at them.

Not long after that, the ten suns rose and Houyi was called to duty.

* * *

Houyi has never been mortal and, in ignorance, knows no terror. The emperor's sentence sits on her but lightly.

The land is slow to heal. As though making up for that single searing day the sky broods, clouds churning thick as mud, crackling with flashes from Tianmu's mirrors. Rain fills cracks in the soil, transmutes dirt to mud, deepening red sand to bruise, ivory sand to honey.

Chang'e shivers, tugging useless drenched silks to herself. Houyi doesn't feel the cold and damp so keenly. Her senses have not adjusted, not convinced yet of mortal fragility. She puts her arm over her wife, a trade of warmth for chill. "You did not have to come. This is my punishment to endure. You shouldn't have come."

"I came because I wanted to. Never forget that, Houyi." Chang'e interlaces her fingers with the archer's. "Tianmu would be loath to take me back under her wing in any case."

"Guanyin would shelter you."

"Out of pity, and I've had enough of that. It is not love. It's not even appreciation. Does it help that we can now grow old together? No, it wouldn't, would it?" She tries uselessly to wring her sleeves dry. "If we head northeast... My eldest brother makes his home there. He is, or was, wealthy and our mother lives with him. It'll make this almost bearable for you, Houyi. No paradise, but it is comfortable."

Houyi doesn't require comfort, but does not say so. Her wife's mother. She imagines that. A family. That too is a difficult concept to grasp, she who has had none.

If she has lost her deific span, she hasn't lost that curious way with which gods travel: a method that truncates distances, sidestepping conventional time. Houyi is subliminally aware she will forget the how of this soon, but for the moment she puts it to use and they are at the estate when morning dawns cool and clear. Perhaps Tianmu and her husband have tired for the moment, and the dragons have gone to rest.

The brother's home has survived, shaded under ancient trees too obstinate to wither and subsisting on a well hidden deep underground. Haggard but alive, servants and family both come to greet Chang'e and Houyi.

The brother: "Back from heaven at last? It was good of you, to be so silent. Never sending word to ask how we fare."

But Chang'e's mother, Yunping, only embraces her with eyes gone wet and full. She is bent; Houyi recalls the story of the ox and the goading.

Introducing Houyi is complicated. Her mode of dress is glanced at sideways by the brother, who scrutinizes with scowl and sneer. His family (two wives, three sons, and an ignored girl named Meijie: young, ox-horn hair buns) follows suit, some without any real conviction. What the house's master does it is best to copy.

"My companion," Chang'e says coldly, "is of heaven."

Her brother's outlook changes abruptly. So does that of his sons, wives, and daughter. "Great sage." Deep bows.

It suffices for the moment.

Meijie pays attention, despite not having any paid to her, and is the first to notice Houyi's bow. "Lady," she says one day, "I hear things from... that."

"Yes."

"I don't think bows are supposed to hiss and purr and bark." Said with the perfect certainty of the very young.

"It's not a fashion, no." Houyi watches Meijie eye her knives. "These things fascinate you."

"No they don't. They are boy things. For my brothers." A little belligerent Meijie straightens. "You look silly. You are silly. Big Mother says so."

The archer cocks her head at the child. "Would you like to learn how to use knives?"

"I'm not a boy."

"Neither am I. Nor do I want to be one."

Unable to reconcile this paradox the girl sticks her tongue out and runs away.

Houyi contemplates the unfathomable minds of children and returns to the room she shares with her wife, to find Chang'e red-faced and trembling with rage. "My brother," she says when she's regained her composure. "He wanted to know when you would bring him luck and coin and make shark fins magically appear on the dining table thrice a day. You are only two more mouths to feed, he said. How does he dare?"

"Technically he's right. I could hunt. There would be meat, of the stringy and fatless sort. As for sharks, I imagine they're all dead." The archer settles into her wife's lap. It's a close fit and she has to hold her weight just so, but they've had practice. "There's more, though, isn't there?"

Chang'e crumples almost into her old self, the silent girl under Tianmu's charge. "He wants me to marry. There's a governor who–the details aren't important, though my brother thinks he has a pet sorcerer of some sort, which is how he went through this unscathed. Stores upon stores of food. If he was a rich man before he's swimming in gold now. And my brother had a portrait of me sent to him. That's all I'm good for, all I ever was."

"I'm sorry, Chang'e. For making you return to this. I shouldn't have–"

"You've already apologized. Five times. Ten! I told you it doesn't matter. I told you I will not bear heaven, or anything else, without you." More quietly she says, "This governor took four wives. Only one remains. The other three died, supposedly by accidents or... worse. I don't know. The living one is striped, my mother says, from back to ankles. Always she weeps. If he cannot have me, he will take Meijie, and my brother has already given his consent. Meijie, Houyi, little Meijie. His own daughter. She's not even twelve. She's a long way from twelve."

"Where does he make his home?"

Chang'e looks at her wife sharply. "You are mortal now."

"Yes."

They always lie close, breast to back. Tonight Houyi keeps a small distance so that when she rises in the deep of the night she doesn't wakeChang'e. She takes her weapons and finds a few servants still up, and coaxes out of them the governor's address. They give it pale-faced, half in hope; they think her much more than she is. She cannot correct them.

Her strides are long and she doesn't yet know fatigue. The moon, half-full, lights her way.

The monster is a blot in the sky, crouching on the roof of the lord's mansion, which curves around a lake brimming with sleek fish. Houyidoes not hesitate. She lets fly as she always has, cleanly, precisely.

It might have heard the twitch of released tension, the letting go of bowstring. It might have reached out and gripped the passing wind, and used that to turn her shot aside. The fiend moves and the arrow penetrates not its eye but a spot between ear and horn. Cartilage parts, noiseless, into shivering shreds.

Houyi shoots once more–a shaft lodges in, and protrudes from, the beast's throat–and it is before her, closing the distance in loping bounds. A knife in her hand, its point testing and triumphing against tender places: she twists and pulls, trailing gore and ligament from the inside of the demon's elbow.

It shrieks in her face, a spume of sound and bile. She turns aside, the blade again finding and plunging into the softest of its flesh. Blood warms her, filling her mouth with the aroma of coins, as it sinks teeth into her flank and wraps her close with the snake of its tail. This is not new toHouyi: she's fought, been wounded, carries scars. It's never made her heart stutter, nor slowed her down. Until this moment.

There is a third arrow, buried deep in the demon's back. It spasms alert, pausing in its chewing and savoring of Houyi. She drives the knife deep, and hard, into its stomach where she's felt the beating of its heart. Her hand follows and grips the organ that gives it life. "Do you know who I am?" she whispers through lips flecked with devil ichor. "You do. Tell your master to ply his trade elsewhere, and tell his master to submit to a sage, live a life of piety and repentance. Make this happen, demon, or I shall travel to your realm and end not only you but your entire clan."

Her fist tightens. A burst of gore. The fiend's spirit leaps through its mouth in a green-black mist, speeding toward the governor's estate.Houyi finds herself, without meaning to, on her knees. Beneath her the broken earth is saturated crimson.

Chang'e comes, bow in hand, and presses herself against Houyi as though by sheer determination she can staunch the blood and dull the pain.

"I am," Houyi murmurs, "mortal now."

By the next hour she has begun to age.

* * *

Ascending Mount Kunlun, where virtue dwells, is simplicity itself to gods. To mortals it is different, not journey but pilgrimage, to seek what they have not, to petition for what they believe is the desire of their hearts. At the mount's foot, a town has sprung up.

The home of Chang'e's brother is months past, and the quiet disbelief of her mother likewise. Shouldering the weight of a bloodied, tornHouyi home, Chang'e stammered to her mother finally that they were not companions or–what Yunping wanted to think–goddess and acolyte, but something else entirely different. That there is a reason they share their room. That their marriage, however distant now, was blessed by Guanyinherself, and shouldn't that have been good enough?

Chang'e desperately misses the indifference of paradise. If their marriage was not celebrated, if Tianmu found it disquieting, if the emperor had winced at its mention–it was still preferable to this, this crushing grief she cannot understand, the disappointment of her mother. Who will care for you in your old age? And she said, We will care for each other, Mother, and my niece will burn houses and gold for us but it did no good.

A servant listening at the door: in that same night her brother screamed at themGet out, no matter her pleading that her wife was wounded, near death. Is she not of heaven? Little liar. Unnatural whore. They beat Houyi while Chang'e fought, costing one of his men an eye; only byYunping's begging was Chang'e spared. When they were finally done they dragged Houyi by the hair and flung her out.

All that is behind, but it is so raw and she cannot ask Houyi for comfort. Houyi who knows hunger and despair for the first time, who lay broken for so long, and ages months in a day.

The town itself is small, as yet nameless though many nicknames have been thought up and hung under eaves. Being where it is lets it prosper, profiting from aspirants hoping to scale Mount Kunlun and gain the attention of a sage, to become ones themselves. Being where it is makes it a target too: too many men, and not a few women, of the world believe that great deeds will raise them to ascendance, and what greater deeds than saving cities and villages from malicious beasts? Vengeance-hounded they come to the bottom of Kunlun, and vengeance-hounded they bring with them collections of teeth and talons, maws and mandibles like butcher-hooks. Sometimes the aspirants are adequate to meeting them. Sometimes they are wanting. In the first week of their stay alone Houyi has killed five threats. A few, realizing who she is, keep their distance from the town–a phenomenon that doesn't go unnoticed by the barbers, hoteliers and traders. They give the couple board, food, shoes. A tailor brings them clothes: brocade gown and sash-pendants for Chang'e and, never asking why, men's robes and trousers for Houyi.

"They adore you," Chang'e tells her wife as they attend a dinner cooked exquisitely by a widower living in the shop under their room. Soup thick with crab meat, soft bean curd in hot paste and diced shrimp, turnip cakes fried crisp and brown. Lavish, but the town is grateful.

"I despise what I have become."

Chang'e's breath hitches. "Mortal?"

"No." Houyi gazes into the liquid red of her tea. "Afraid."

She liberates the cup from Houyi's unresisting fingers, and takes the woman who was a god into her arms. "It doesn't make you weak,Houyi. Even gods are afraid. Do you remember the looks on their faces when the suns rose? They were deathly frightened, even the emperor."

"He was born mortal."

"I am mortal. I've always been. If I've learned anything in so short a life it is that fear keeps you alive and coaches you to survive. You are still Houyi the Archer and you save people, and you are the woman I love without limits or conditions."

Houyi lowers her head to the crook of Chang'e's neck, pressing her mouth to her wife's skin: acknowledges the transience of the beating pulse that reflects her own. "Thank you."

She has not said why it is that they have come to this town and Chang'e was too relieved to escape her brother's to ask: any destination would have done, so long as it was away.

But now there is a box, which Houyi unearths from the untidy collection that is her belongings: the lid is ivory, carved into a likeness ofHouyi's house. She opens it–there is no lock save the trust that lies between wives–and lays down the feathers, sleek and black, warm and huge. On each is calligraphy so atrocious it can only have been written with talon-tips. The sun-crow, last of his kind, must have balanced himself precariously: two legs for his weight, the third dripping ink and poised over his own feathers spread out like manuscript pages.

The first reads, We both grieve.

The second reads, more confidently, It was for love that we rose.

Our father said, in passing only, that he would like to see his sons in their utterness subsuming the sky. He thought us our mother's but never his–and what belongs to Dijun must be Dijun's alone: you will have become wise of this, we've watched you turn by turn. None of us wished to forsake our mother, but we were hungry, so hungry, for his affection. It's the nature of crows to be greedy. So on that day we decided, what harm could it do? We pulled one another, for without Mother's chariot the ascent is difficult, and thought we would present ourselves as our father wanted. A moment. It would not hurt anyone.

But it was bright and sweet, and made us drunk. To burn together! As never before, and never again. We did not think. That is why we did not listen when you called to us until our eldest brother died, and then what was there to do but fight, in grief, in fury?

Death was a stranger, to us, to me. To my mother too. She's never lost, in her absoluteness, her self-contained grace.

The final one is small, half the size of a hand, and says only, I do not ask forgiveness, as you have asked for none. Some things are beyond forgiving and absolving.

"We must bring this to His Majesty," Chang'e says, though she hasn't the remotest idea how. Mortals do not petition the celestial monarch, not directly, and who would sponsor Houyi? Not the final sun-crow. "How did these come to you?"

"Falling from the sky at dusk, one by one. I'd have shown them to you, but I wanted to be sure. To have the entire tale." Houyi puts them back and shuts the box. "I've done enough harm to them. To take this to His Majesty will press him to punish the crow. But knowing, for a certainty now, that Dijun did as he did–it is not right, it is not just."

"It never was, Houyi. There must be an authority to which you can appeal."

"I mean to ascend Kunlun. Xiwangmu rules there and she has... treasures. I don't think she will send us back to heaven, but she may grant us life everlasting."

Chang'e's pulse leaps. She cannot lie to herself that immortality is a luxury she's never coveted but, "She will not give it freely."

"We will earn it. Or I shall. You don't have to. We wouldn't be here in the first place if I hadn't been–"

"Ridiculous but heartbreakingly earnest. Why else would I have consented to be yours? I will come with you, and we will do this together."Chang'e brushes Houyi's eyelid, lips to lashes, and does not tell her that back in heaven this plagued her: the gulf between them, the eternity that would be Houyi's by right and hers never. "I will not say no to forever by your side, wandering and witnessing the world. Only make me one promise."

"I would promise you anything."

"When we have obtained this miracle, we find Dijun and settle the score."

Houyi's smile, which has become rarer than opals, is like the dawn. "You are not frightened of confronting the father of suns?"

"You were not frightened of refusing him. In all the heavens, and all the earth, there's no woman braver than you."

They share a laugh, and share a meal, and taste the desserts on the tips of each other's tongue.

The paths to the summit of Kunlun are many, and a hundred times again as many maps chart the ways. In that little town the maps are sold, scrolls plain and gilded, striated like elephant hide and utter white, held in bamboo and silver tubes. Adventurous entrepreneurs extend the reach of their commerce through Kunlun's roads, peddling liquor and glutinous rice, dried fruits and hundred-year eggs. Not a few used to be aspirants but, either in failure or realization, find fulfillment instead through the exchange of coins, in the trade of tales, and the wistful watching of others climbing the mount as they used to do.

There are rivers of fire, waterfalls of blades, and half-seen moths which sip breath and life from the ears of sleeping travelers. Kunlun, even a glimpse, must be purchased by torn flesh and shattered teeth, and blood like black pearls glinting in the night.

Houyi and Chang'e guard one another as flesh guards bone, burning tallow to lure and scorch the moths. When they fell a monster of hard hide they skin it, and sew it into armor against waterfalls. In deep pits they find aspirant carcasses, faces papered in yellow talismans, leaping futilely in death to an escape just out of reach. Houyi lights a torch and frees them from flesh and memory. Chang'e salvages their bones, fire-toughened, to fashion into raft and pole with which to cross the rivers that rise and ebb without rhythm or warning.

It makes them sharp, Kunlun; it is feral, for all its proximity to the virtuous court, and lessons them in wildness. A world is born between them where only they exist–Chang'e and Houyi, Houyi and Chang'e. Traders that they meet at all, for they avoid the mapped and trodden roads, are irrelevant. Sometimes conveniences, other times momentary irritants. Every few days one of them would have to remind her wife, We seekXiwangmu and her treasures, which are said to confer unending life.

The air thins to needlepoints in their lungs and the rivers turn to rime. It is difficult to breathe, but the stairway that leads to the home ofXiwangmu shimmers in the distance: reachable, if only just. Out of an unspoken agreement they stop to gaze upon it, long and long, for thoughXiwangmu's house is not quite heaven, neither is it of mortals. And what will it be like to taste that air again, sleep under that sky, which looms beyond the one that men and women of the earth see, that roof of the world?

Making their way upward they fast, subsisting on bitter ice-water and each other's heat: to gain entry to Xiwangmu's home necessitates purification. Memories of rich warm food wear down until they are as thin and colorless as the cracked brittle road beneath their feet. They hold onto one another, charm against forgetting and hunger. Hand in hand they whisper the other's name. They do not rest. Only the winds remain, and their hair crusted in frost whipping in the snow.

It is a lifetime, to mount the steps which are steep as walls and half again as tall. They cut apart monster hide and with it wrap their hands, their feet; even so each foothold and handhold draws blood, and the steps hoard every drop. Chill pulls at their eyes, draws tears that freeze on their cheeks as fast as they bead.

When they crest the topmost, the final step, the sky has changed and it is autumn. They are sinew, then, and bone: pushed and pulled by will, held up by the strength of one another's arms.

Xiwangmu waits for them on the steps of her house, which is only a house, no larger than the needs of a woman content with her own company. Her fingertips are stained brown with soil; across her lap is a broom, its bristles tangled in twigs and leaves, moth wings and spider webs. She wears no regalia, no finery. Heaven's empress could have been the wife of a merchant or a reclusive scholar.

"I know why you have come," she says, "but that will wait. Inside: you will want something hot and balanced, and full of colors."

There is no meat at Xiwangmu's table, but it little matters. Chang'e and Houyi eat with the delicacy of those too long famished, without appetite, in bites they do not taste and sips they do not feel: hunger has infiltrated their arteries and it is easier to tolerate than to outright cure. If there are parameters and rules to what they should and should not touch, they are not told. When their hunger, conditioned into briefness by fasting, is sated the empress gives them steamed cakes dusted with sesame and studded in dried lychee. She offers tangerines in red papers that tell them it is the new year. Sweetness goes down easier.

"I know why you have come," Xiwangmu repeats, "and I am willing to grant that which you desire, for it was taken from one of youunrightly."

"It was never mine," Chang'e says, and wishes she had not.

"You have equally earned the way: I will not grant it to one and deny the other. In return I ask for one favor. A mortal woman who served me passed and left in her wake an orphan son, Fengmeng. I would do her a good turn. Teach him the bow."

The archer flexes her fingers, surprised to find them supple again so soon, stair-cuts turned to scars. The food was more than food, and the sweets more than a magic of fruit and flour. Beside her Chang'e grows quiet. "I have only ever taught my wife, Majesty. It seems trivial, that is true, and more than a fair exchange, but–"

"It is a favor, not a requirement." Xiwangmu draws from her sleeve a casket no larger than her hand, and places it before the couple. "Within this is a single pill, the last of its kind. In its entirety it will tender divinity, if not acceptance at my husband's palace, and deny death. Take half each and it will suspend: though it won't heal flesh already broken, it will give you eternity side by side."

Houyi's hand hesitates over the casket. "Majesty."

"Your loss of immortality came of your own doing, Houyi, of your arrogance. But you are only a child and making mistakes is what children do. My husband never interrogated Dijun, and that's a galling lack of foresight. Take the pill, but delay its swallowing. It's been made in a certain way, not meant for unpurified mortals, and it will take six turns of the moon breathing Kunlun before you are immune to its venom."

Knowing exactly how acute her wife's sense of duty can be, Chang'e makes herself speak. "Is there nothing I can offer, Majesty?"

"Were you not already a wife, and were I my husband, I would have demanded that you allowed Fengmeng to court you." Xiwangmu rufflesChang'e's hair. "You are a good child. Once you have gained your wish, find your mother and tell her you are well. That you are happy. Whatever she might have felt at your marriage, it is the terror of all mothers to think their children dead."

Inevitably Houyi agrees to train Fengmeng: the archer finds herself unable to accept Xiwangmu's gift for nothing. He is a child of Kunlun, reserved and straining to look wise, and ought to have been taken as someone's apprentice. The empress chooses otherwise. He must prove himself, like any other, and he cannot do that without being sent into the world to live. "So many ascendants are too young," Xiwangmu tellsChang'e, "and I do not mean their years."

The archer is not a lenient mentor. She forces Fengmeng away from the summit and makes him practice on the banks of burning rivers, tells him to aim at the leaping dead, pits him against ancient monsters. Xiwangmu has granted Houyi a seal with her name upon it, which lets the archer return to the empress' house in a single step. But in the first week she informs Fengmeng he must climb the stairway, as though a petitioner. If Xiwangmu thinks this harsh she does not remark upon it. Fengmeng clenches his jaw and does as he is bidden.

Chang'e wheedles Xiwangmu into letting her pass onto girl petitioners what she's gained from her own living and what she's gained fromHouyi. Difficult at first, for she's little older than her pupils, even younger than some. Understanding is established slowly, respect slower, and eventually a connection emerges. Not quite the prescribed one of mistress and students, but no less true for that.

It occupies her and makes her happier, though she still paces the confines of the room Xiwangmu has given them, and stands at the edge of Kunlun's summit to watch for her wife's return. It is so easy to wait, an old habit of hers, from childhood to near-bride to serving Tianmu: and she remembers too how her brothers were the ones sent out to learn letters and make things, to apprentice and seize more than they were born with, while she waited to marry. Waiting, her mother educated her, is a woman's lot. Waiting for a groom, waiting for a husband, waiting for a child to be born.

It is the first thing she tells her aspirants: You do not have to wait. Do what you must if they are necessary to keep your mothers or sisters warm and fed, but do not wait for luck or unluck to come to you. The second is: If, when, you ascend seek out Xiangu, Guanyin, Tianmu. There is protection, of a sort, and you may find it easier to be.

She observes Fengmeng, too, and what she sees indents her brow into a frown. "He is obsessed with your teaching," she remarks as they undress for the night. Climbing Kunlun they have had to swathe themselves in layers of fabric, hide, worse; they have sorely missed heat sealed between the curves of their bodies, the immediacy of bare skin.

"That is a surprise, seeing that he nearly dies to it every other day." Houyi, almost nude, hangs up her knives on the wall next to her bow. She has been cleaning the weapons while waiting for her hair to dry and, though it is routine, the sight of near-naked Houyi and unsheathed blades always excites Chang'e. She has never been able to tell if Houyi does it on purpose.

"He worships you, more than a little. The way he speaks, or doesn't speak rather, around you. How he looks at you hold your bow. I think you're the first woman he's gotten close to."

The archer makes a contemplative noise deep in her throat and, settling on her haunches, frames Chang'e's face with her hands, which are callused, bas-reliefs of hunts in the pads of thumbs and joints. "Am I doing something wrong?"

That surprises Chang'e into a rueful grin. "I think I am only being jealous of your hours and I don't much like the boy."

"Fengmeng's harmless. There are six months to put him into some kind of shape, and I want to be done with it within that span, no more. When Xiwangmu's gift is safe we can both take it and leave him to his own devices." Houyi climbs into the curtained bed. "I am grateful to her, but not that grateful. There's such a life ahead of us and I'm impatient to meet it. But... before we get to that, do you want to go hunting?"

"Right now the only prey I want is you. Tomorrow? Yes, hunting will do."

When Chang'e is not with her aspirants, then, she would be with Houyi keeping the wild beasts of Kunlun in check: they have a habit of proliferating beyond the quantity required to test those climbing the mountain. Fengmeng turns more withdrawn when he sees them ranging together; neither woman pays him heed.

Nearly half a year passes before a new petitioner arrives, bloodied, with a letter for Chang'e.

It is from Meijie and tells them that winter has been harsh on Yunping, and Meijie's father is unwilling to send for a physician. The girl vows, in an unsure childish hand, that she will do what she can; she's learned her letters, and enlisted the passing warrior to deliver this. She hopes that her aunt will be proud of her.

A week remains before the moon turns. "I can go ahead," Chang'e says, worrying at the cheap paper with her nails.

Houyi shakes her head. "We will go together."

They pay their respects, Chang'e making farewells to aspirants who hold her hands and tell her they will practice her advice. She promises to return to Kunlun when she is immortal, and the way forward and backward simpler for her to tread. For now she has Houyi, and a world to cup in her palms. "When I am here next," she tells her students, "I will have more to impart. I will be less foolish."

(As they depart Fengmeng tries to speak around the silence that sits in his mouth like a pebble, but they are gone before he is able to conquer it.)

Xiwangmu's seal in hand, they are at the town at the foot of Kunlun in one step.

It is deserted.

Lantern light pools on the streets and ripples as they pass. In each shop chairs are empty, even though the shelves are as amply stocked as they ever were. At a teahouse the tables are set, bowls and chopsticks, soup-spoons and condiment jars. But the kitchen is silent, the chopping boards clean on their hooks.

They enter the widower's shop, and find it too empty–would have walked on, if Houyi hasn't heard the small noise they both recognize for hitched sobs muffled behind knuckles. When the archer uncovers her the girl screams, squeezing herself into the crevice that's allowed her to hide between armoires, flailing and kicking as Houyi brings her out and Chang'e tries to soothe. Neither of them knows much about children, but by and by the girl realizes that the two are not demons. For it is demons, she tells them in a fractured tale pieced from glass sounds and shadow glimpses, that have emptied the houses. Her father, her aunts, her friends. Everything has been going wrong since the archer left.

Houyi examines the girl, closely, with a scrutiny that makes her burst into tears. "You are not one of them," she says, at length. The disguises of children and maidens are the favorites of fiends and she has no intent of falling into such a trap. "Will you wait here? My wife and I will look for survivors." But when Chang'e makes to leave the girl starts shrieking, clinging to her, brooking no attempts at disentanglement. The archer sighs and puts down their belongings. "I will be back quickly."

When the archer has gone the child quiets down by degrees. Chang'e makes nonsense noises, one hand stroking the girl's matted hair and the other clenched tight around the knife Houyi made for her. She tries very hard not to feel afraid.

She isn't able to tell, exactly, when the unease begins. A lengthening of a shadow? A chill in the air that does not belong?

A shape on the wall, horned bull head and serpent tail. In a moment it is silhouette; in another it has bled through, tar ooze, and Chang'eremembers the first time she let fly at a beast without Houyi's hands over her own. The first time Houyi bled, and feared.

Its grin is a wound, yellow mortification under a snout the color of rust.

"You have been slain before," Chang'e says, and through will made fierce by Kunlun's wildness, does not tremble. "I do not fear you."

Its tail hisses derision, a soft wet sound of rotten meat parting.

"Do you remember what Houyi the Archer said? She will destroy you and all you love."

Houyi the Archer is human. As are you.

It comes for her, a blur smearing across her vision.

If she isn't as fleet as Houyi or as strong, still she has been tutored by the best. She dodges, and weaves, and draws it out of the house. Outside Houyi will hear; in the chilly night Houyi will come.

She is still thinking that when the monster's broodmates, shadows given flesh, tear into her. Houyi will hear.

She is still thinking that when they pin her down, drawing blood-threads out of her skin as though for spooling and weaving, flaying and separating her flesh into strips as though for drying and preserving. Houyi will come.

And Houyi does come, when she can no longer see. But Chang'e hears a wail high and long: only that is not possible. Houyi does not make a sound like that, collected and graceful Houyi, who is always dignified and impervious even in deep pain, in deep grief. So it cannot be Houyi'stears that burn Chang'e's peeled nerves. It cannot be Houyi's mouth which lets loose such cries.

Fingertips pry at her lips. Something small is slid through.

Awareness takes Chang'e like dry land takes a fish. Xiwangmu's gift fills her, past capacity, past possibility. In her stomach it takes root, in her throat it blooms, and in her mouth it silences her scream.

The sky rushes toward her, and she is certain that the pill hasn't lost its poison after all–that this is death, not apotheosis: and she is at peace with that, for divinity alone, divinity thieved, is nothing at all. She will die without having stolen immortality from Houyi, and that will be enough.

There are stars in her mouth, and night in her bones.

* * *

The moon is a mirror that swallows the sun-crow's light, and gives it back–a miser's jealousy–pale and drained in the night.

Chang'e doesn't weep. She is past that, and in any case it is so cold that shedding tears hurts; it wrings too much out of her, heat and memories. Tirelessly she has walked its streets, for she is a god now and has transcended the limits of humanity–but though she has traced the paths, finding new ones and twists and turns she never saw before in those familiar, she cannot find a way out. She locates the moon's edge and unthinking steps over to find herself back at the center. But she persists.

Once, during one of her explorations, she hears a voice like music and Dijun is there, seated on a carved stone bench. I have gone to Houyiand asked her, one last time, for her hand. She said no. But you–I can bring you to her, and for love of you she will consent. As my wife she'll regain divinity, and you will both find I am not without mercy. You will see one another, at times of my choosing. Do you not desire this, girl?

Chang'e refuses with a knife that opens the sun-father's cheek. His bone shines gold, and his blood gushes fire.

The rabbit tries to warm her as she navigates the city, telling her stories. It loves her desperately but it is small, and it is not Houyi. Accepting that, it tells her of a room with many windows, each panel painted black as in the court of Xuanwu. Each overlooks a different view, depending on the room's whims and sometimes cruelty. Of the latter it warns: Please, please be careful.

She does not take caution. It is something. It is, by far, superior to nothing. Xiwangmu's pill filled her with such lightness that she went up and up, until the moon caught her, and she woke. All her wounds were gone, save one. Existence without Houyi is an injury that festers deeper than apotheosis may overturn.

The moon is a labyrinth, its craggy mountains holding houses that have never been habited, palaces with empty thrones, stone gardens where black waters slosh in basins and ghost swans drift through the air. Through paths paved with calcified eyes the rabbit leads her, up and into a palace where lanterns are tasseled with peacock ligaments and feathers: and is that not a shadow of Houyi's home, the one in paradise, which feels like many lives ago?

Please be careful. It will not amuse you, the sights. The city loves to deepen hurts. To kill without killing, if it may.

She opens one window and sees sunlight.

Houyi sits in a workshop full of canvas and cut bamboo surrounding her like pieces of a beast she's slain and disassembled to craft into furniture and weapons. The bamboo ribs suggest the beginning of wings, or perhaps an immense sky lantern. Her lips move, though Chang'e hears only silence and she aches–it hurts, to see without hearing, to see without touching. But at least she sees.

Chang'e requires no sleep, and not much food, now. She holds the rabbit in her lap, and watches as the sky lantern inflates. It floats high into the night, and Houyi gazes after it until it is long out of sight.

The archer climbs a mount greater and higher than Kunlun, and there lays the foundations of a tower. It is built up, and up, but in the end it can bear only so much. Not quite collapsing but listing, and it is not anywhere near high enough.

She finds Chang'e's mother in the capital and tells her, in words Chang'e reads from the parting and shutting of her mouth, Your daughter is a goddess now.

Yunping does not find any joy in this. She seems so much older, and doubly stooped, having survived but never recovered from that winter.Chang'e cannot remember how long it has been since their leave-taking of her brother's house. There are lines in Houyi's face, too, clustering thick at the corners of lips and eyes.

The archer asks after Meijie, and learns that it is now the girl who provides both for her mother and grandmother, a scholar of some means. If she doesn't do as well as her male peers, she does well enough. The governor has been removed from his post, ensconced in a temple, white-haired and drifting toward a lonely deathbed.

Chang'e sees the Kunlun aspirants, some ascended now, others still seeking entry to heaven. Each does this in her own way, some by marrying a sage, others by the skin of their teeth. For none of them is the path simple or quick.

Between this, Houyi is joined by Fengmeng. She regards him distantly, him existing only at the furthest periphery of her vision and awareness–but her at the center of his. Chang'e can see it in his eyes, the same franticness with which the rabbit adores her but more dangerous, edged by humanity. By years spent out of Kunlun, perhaps, and he beats his fists against the earth crying Why can't I best you? while Houyi stands aside, her bow clasped loosely. His he has snapped to halves then segments.

Later: Why do you want to best me?

Fengmeng holds himself small as though to protect his heart. To be worthy of having been your disciple; to be worthy of heaven–I cannot be lesser. Not to you.

That is not how the proving of worth functions; you want to be better than I am specifically, and that means nothing at all.

His glance at her face, furtive. You trained Chang'e.

My wife was the best that I ever taught. None compares. Without her I wouldn't have overcome Kunlun's trials.

Fengmeng's hands have turned to fists. What if I'd met you before she did?

Another might have laughed, but Chang'e knows Houyi has always been too kind. It would have been no different. There's no place for you; there never was. Why do you persist? I'm long done with suitors of any sort, and done with the obfuscations I fed them. They tired me when I was young. Doubly now they exhaust me.

Are you not afraid of being alone?

Solitude may be borne, with some patience. But she looks up at the sky where the sun-crow flies; where at night the moon would rise and she would glimpse the pits and etchings and, rarely, a woman's shadow.

The last window opens to Houyi in a valley, surrounded on all sides by men gaunt with starvation, and Fengmeng in their midst whispering to them. She is of heaven; her liver, her hair–any piece of her will bring fortune and prosperity. It is an easy lie to believe for desperate men.

She grips her knives without tension, without fear; she was a protector god, forbidden once to harm humans, but she isn't that anymore. She kills them with the sure knowledge that it is a slaughter, that none of them is a match for her. When it is down to just Fengmeng, who holds yet another bow having misshot again and again, who snivels on his knees begging for absolution–when it is down to him she only turns away, and tells him that he's learned nothing from her instructions. For Xiwangmu's sake I spare you. Nothing more. Of forgiveness she offers none.

The next time, the ambush is an army, amplified by the blood she spilled the first and second and third occasions. She is monster to their heroes, a god gone wrong, come down to earth to wreak ruin. And again there is Fengmeng with his lies, eliding always his own part, his unclean jealousy. She seeks godhood and toward that she has boiled young men in a great cauldron–from their blood, an elixir that'll grant endless life. Your brothers, your sons.

This time there isn't enough of Houyi, and too many of them.

This time Fengmeng does not miss, and when she falters for a moment between knife-slashes he takes aim.

He weeps as he loosens the bowstring. But even wracked by sobs and sickness and rage he does not miss. He did, after all, learn from the best.

Chang'e boards the windows shut, one by one, and then the door. She no longer seeks to escape the city.

* * *

Hell is red and black, and red and black, enough light to see yourself–what you have become–and the wounds the demons inflict upon you, with spears and thorn-trees, and long luxurious oil-baths in boiling brass cauldrons. For Houyi it is an arrow-shaft protruding from her breast, it is tears and gashes in her skin, and bruises where they beat her until her heart stopped.

She examines the shaft. She pulls it out slowly. There is pain; in this place there is nothing but. Enough to make her retch, though the archer does not. Within herself it is control that she values second after memories of her wife.

When the demons come, she is ready.

In her hand is only an arrow, stained in her own blood and Fengmeng's sweat, but she remembers a knife and that is what it feels like, weighs like. Even in this light she is used to the finesse of cutting and tearing, and with the same precision she shoots she drives the knife into gaps between armor; she inserts its tip into eye sockets, and cuts off ears–horse ears, swine ears–with abattoir ease.

They give pause.

"I will go willingly," she says to the soldiers of hell, who know who she is, who have lost kith and kin to her methodical massacres, "if you can show me that my name is on the registry of the dead."

The one among them not armed, a capped and robed bureaucrat with a seahorse's face, consults his scroll. On it unspools, collecting andpuddling until it is up to the bureaucrat's waist; when it has reached his shoulders he at last concedes Houyi's name is not to be found. Still she must be placed, named and posited in the hierarchy of hell, and so they bring her to one of the high magistrates: a giant encased in bronze. His face is a mask, twisted into a deep scowl.

He asks, "Father?"

"My origins must be known to you. I have none."

Ignoring her he goes on, "Mother? Sister? Husband?"

Thrice she says no; again she tells him that she was born of no parent, made only by the particular wants of heaven. Wants that seem to have expired, but nevertheless.

In the end she is sent to the Old Woman of Forgetting.

For expediency Meng makes her house by the gate under which all dead must pass. Its doors are always open, for hourly there are hundreds of men and women deceased who must be processed and made to drink Meng's mixture. Some unwilling, but most embrace it and cradle the little cups she hands out as though it is salvation.

Meng receives Houyi privately, in a room full of earthenware and somnambulant lizards. When the archer has seated herself she is offered a cup. It is dainty, this cup, and no color at all–though its sheen reflects her face in rainbows, and behind her she can see the moon racing by.

She looks up and gazes into Meng's age-soft face. "No."

"It can buy you grace. You may start again a child. With parents and kin, and a life unwinding before you."

"Chang'e is not part of this cycle. I'll only make her grieve, watching from where she is knowing that I've discarded memories of her. It would be selfish."

Meng withdraws the cup. "What will you do then?"

"Wait." The archer fingers the arrow that is also a knife. "Watch."

She sits by as the dead file through Meng's parlor, sipping slow or gulping greedy. Houyi thinks she sees her wife's mother among them once, but it is difficult to be sure. In the moment before they pass the gate a few become whole again, young again, and then are gone.

Houyi is a mindful guest. She helps with the brewing and distilling, though she's careful never to inhale when steam bursts from beneath lids and wafts up in fragrant clouds. She also does the windows over so they would be draft- and fire-proof; Meng chuckles to see this, and asks what it is with her obsession with carpentry when first she was born with a bow. "It keeps me useful," the archer answers. "It keeps my mind turning, my fingers nimble."

It is when she is climbing up to patch Meng's roof that the dragons come.

They pull a chariot, and upon the chariot are the mother of suns and her last child. If the demons give Houyi wide berth Xihe sends them outright scurrying, for she blazes and singes, and those who are so used to roasting souls like little to be roasted in turn.

Houyi is off the roof and on the ground even before Xihe's eyes fall on her.

"Archer," the goddess says as she steps out of her chariot. "Despite your new home you don't seem especially tortured."

Houyi does not speak of her mortal decades. "I'm sorry that I did not speak to you before. None dared approach you, and I could not myself reach so high."

"I'm not here for your excuses. You seem adrift, archer, and in want of a new duty. So I've come to bring you to that."

The archer gives her host thanks, promising to return and finish her work with the roof. Meng does not ask if this is what she's been waiting for, and Houyi does not offer to explain.

Houyi touches the chariot; pulls her hand away from its metal to find blisters on her fingers. "It burns."

"This was made for me, and drank in the fire of myself and my sons. You will absorb some, until the heat lives in your gums and your lungs, until you can illuminate a day mandated to be wan." Xihe does not smile; her anger is beyond malice. "But it will always burn. Remember this, archer. Each dawn will hurt. This is punishment, not exaltation."

"I do not fault you, lady."

"Do not mistake me: I care little for Dijun's faithlessness. We are barely spouses. I do not despise you out of puerile jealousy. It is the murder of my sons that I cannot forgive; it is for that you have been sentenced."

"What I did is beyond forgiving." Houyi touches the reins gingerly. It leaves a ruby welt on the heel of her palm. "But I would ask for a boon."

Xihe looks at her, as though from a great height. "Why do you believe you deserve one, much less that I'd grant it?"

"It is not much." The archer bows low, her humility an offering, lower than she ever bowed to the emperor. It is obeisance; it is a suspension of pride. "And I believe you might do, in recognition that we were all injured by the same blow."

The goddess' mouth twists. "Dijun keeps a scar from your wife's hand. The first, for one so vain. He never understood why I forsook him, why the children are not his. It is a simple point. My sons could have spoken to me. Asked. I might have found them a safe way. I knew, I always knew, how tedious they found it to spend nine days out of every ten on Fusang. How they loved to be together."

The one surviving son hides his face in the shadow of vast wings. He has grown thin and tattered in grief and singularity, in bleeding his light and heat, in rising alone and resting alone on Fusang's empty branches. His wings droop, eyes like obsidian gone to dull stone, dry as baked prunes.

"I could have come and spoken to you. I did not. Of such silences are misfortunes built, I've learned, not fate or any decree greater than us."

"Ah," Xihe murmurs. Her eyes remain hard. "I will not forgive you. Understand this. I will never forgive you."

"Yes," Houyi says, and keeps her gaze trained on the dragons Xihe has tamed for her chariot. One rolls a limpid eye toward her, cautious, whiskers quivering.

"What is it that you want then? That you cannot grasp for yourself despite your conceit?"

She tells Xihe.

* * *

The moon is brittle spite and envy, and if it ever was a bird the memory of wings and flight is long past. The paths to it are hard, from it harder still. It is why those not quite of heaven, the chastised and the exiled like Chang'e, are sent here.

But the moon is hungry. It lusts for warmth, which slides past as though its jagged cliffs and mountains are sieves, and in that rare moment when the sun-crow comes near the moon lowers its guard. It drowses and basks, opening itself, a plea written across its barren city. The lanterns come alive all together, flickering into characters, tentative greetings.

Chang'e stands in one of the high courtyards. The rabbit curls in her arms, rejoicing that she–almost–smiles as chariot, dragons and crow pass overhead. From this distance the goddess' figure is invisible.

This time the chariot pauses and lowers. City shadows cavort wild, unused to this abrupt change in light and temperature. The swans flee into ponds and lakes, some part of them recalling a day long ago where ten suns convened.

Houyi lands, lightly, on her feet. She climbs the path spiraling up to Chang'e in quick, long strides. There are tears in her eyes, the sun's radiance on her skin.

"Oh," Chang'e whispers, and, "oh, why are you crying?" Said even though she, too, gasps and her words are leaving her like broken glass.

When they embrace their cheeks are wet, salt-smeared and fever-warm. They touch and touch again to make certain the other exists. If they are seen, if they are watched, they do not care.

Houyi may not stay; her new duty tugs at her as hell tugs at the newly dead. But they have time to kiss, and love, and make each other laugh. Chang'e holds to her tight when it is time for Houyi to return to the chariot. "For now it will do," she tells Houyi, "but you must come back soon. And write."

The archer promises. "Always."

On that night, the moon shines at its brightest: and mortals below see in that an auspice for newness and wonder, to be celebrated in rich cakes and lantern lights each night Houyi brings the chariot and finds her wife.

When they part, they do knowing that they will see one another again: a year to them is as short as an hour. And maybe, someday, they will find a path easier to travel, a freedom for Chang'e to come and go as she pleases. They plan for that, long days in sunlit grass and lotus seeds in syrup.

Nothing is beyond reach when they have come so far, and they are not afraid.

Chang'e Dashes from the Moon

1.

There's a lady on the moon and she has a rabbit; at mid-autumn we have mooncakes when her husband visits.

Long ago the moon grew a city on its skin like nacreous shell around a pearl, and in this barren city lives a goddess who was once a girl.

The goddess counts the years, at the beginning.

She folds gold paper and silver paper at the proper months, and burns them for her mother. She makes houses of glassy yellow windows and pale walls, double-storeyed, and burns those so that her mother will have a comfortable residence in her passage through death. She makes animals, companions, furniture. When she begins counting in decades instead of years she starts burning offerings for her niece. It is the wrong way around; she is the elder, and she should be the one waiting beyond for her niece's sendings.

But she is immortal, and her family is not.

After the first century she burns offerings for her mother, her niece, and her niece's children. Who knows what descendants do now, whether they remember their duty? So she takes it upon herself, just to be safe. She watches the houses in the mortal realms change and lengthen, until they become towers which pierce the clouds, until their cities are thick and thronged and she can't imagine locating her kin anymore in the million-millions that overwhelm the streets.

Sometimes her name slips away from her. In defiance she etches into the soft stone of the lunar city, I am Chang'e, and I have a wife whom every night I long to meet.Her chiseling erases itself before an hour finishes.

The walls are high to fill her sight. The houses are huge to make her small.

In moments where she can rouse herself from lassitude, Chang'e indulges in fury. Though her mortal life she learned much, the knife and the bow. Cut though she might, the moon does not bleed. She loosens flaming arrows into the dark, but the moon does not burn. There are moments when, stepping through a garden gate or passing through a door, she glimpses a world under sunlight. It does not last.

Often she watches the rabbit toil at its mortar. It makes no mention of leaving; this it seems to consider its rightful place. But it is the closest she has to a friend.

"Does the moon think?" she asks, as though in idle wonderment.

The rabbit pauses its pounding. "What makes you think so, Lady Chang'e?"

"It is only a thought." She nods at its jars and pots. "What are you making?"

This medicine, it explains, reunites flesh and spirit: those chased out of their own skin by malicious devils, those who have spent too long in dreams, those sent to the underworld by an accounting error. Many ills require such a cure.

Chang'e peers into the mortar at the thick, glittering purple paste. "It'll work on any body?"

"Even ones not of flesh," the rabbit says with solemn pride. "My pharmacology is unrivaled, though many have tried to match it."

She smiles and strokes its long ears. "Perhaps one day you can make me a pill to make me heavy, so heavy that I will sink from the sky and return to the earth."

Its nose twitches and it looks at her with sad red eyes. "I wish you would be happy, Lady Chang'e."

"I'm happy, rabbit."

She does not say that happy does not come from wishing. Once she thought that was so, swept into the arms of the archer god who came into being full-grown and graceful as though born from a wish. Centuries later she has learned otherwise.

A ghost butterfly alights on her shoulder. There are many of those in the gardens of the moon, phantom swans and mute songbirds, wisps of feathers and beaks that come apart if she looks at them too hard. A menagerie of creatures on the verge of breaking down.

Chang'e will not break with them.

She inhales the scent of the rabbit's works, smells bitter and tart, fierce and demure. In the chambers of her heart she holds an idea, a solution. Holding it close and hid--so the moon will not hear, so the moon will not see--she leaves the rabbit and, steps light as the passing of autumn, follows the ghosts.

* * *

Heroic Houyi shot down nine sun-crows to save humanity, and through schemes of the jealous came to his ruin; in death he rose to the tenth sun, where ever after he made his home.

For material Chang'e would have liked clay, soft and obedient to her hands, but the city is pavement end to end, and hard soil or harder rock where it is not. She settles with cherrywood, which is all they have to make anything from, there being an endless supply from the one tree. Over and over she's watched its leaves unfurl green and fresh and branches burst forth stronger and steelier than before. The faster Wu Gang hews, the faster it regrows. Like the rabbit he never mentions escape, content to suffer and wait out his sentence on the moon, but sometimes she thinks it is merely that he has no one to return to.

Appropriating chisel and saw from the woodsman's cache she learns the fundamentals of carving, and over the months comes to understand where to chip, where to cut, where to etch: the subtleties of grain and knots, the differences between sap- and heartwood. Though she isn't done when Houyi's visit nears, it is progress and it keeps her busy, elbow-deep in shavings and dust.

On this day mortals kindle lanterns for her and Houyi, she hears, and puts on dragon dances. And marry: it's been absorbed into the matchmakers' calendars, one of the most favorable dates in the year and certainly the most in the season. Chang'e doesn't know how to feel about that. She remembers being a mortal girl on earth, in a sedan chair gilded and painted crimson, her face behind a veil. Her lips pursed into a thin line, her skull full of thunder. She'd have become a merchant's junior wife, the last in a hierarchy of five; dreams of anything else would have shriveled up and died in her unmourned.

Perhaps mortals are different now, and marriages are happier things. Houyi has suggested they might be, but she finds that beyond the reach of imagination.

Zhongqiujie has become an annual celebration for the inhabitants of the moon--which is to say, all three of them--as though to make up for the lack of congratulations and liquor when she wedded Houyi. Wu Gang brings lanterns shaped as vast lotuses and serpents. The rabbit has made cakes, viscous lotus paste inside and the salted yolks of ghost birds: they were pale rather than orange, but they taste no less rich. She thanks them, heartfelt. "It means more than I can say, both to me and Houyi."

"It is good for husband and wife to unite, Lady Chang'e."

Her smile stiffens. With effort she keeps it from hardening into a rictus. Tact has become as necessary as the air they breathe, and so Chang'e has ever avoided the subject. "You have met Houyi."

His mouth sets. "I have had the honor of acquaintance with heaven's best archer, Lady Chang'e."

"I realize Houyi doesn't dress as most women do. It pleases her to dress as she does, and she requires no more reason than that."

"Goddess, it's never been my place to criticize how the divine garb their sacred persons."

"Very good. So, Houyi is a woman. On this we can at least establish a common ground?"

The woodsman nods.

She wishes she could say this marks progress. Unfortunately Wu Gang has never mistaken Houyi's gender: he has always recognized that her wife is female, that Chang'e is monogamous. Yet he puts that side by side with the idea that Chang'e has a husband, and in a stunning blast of illogic reconciles the two. "Houyi is married to me. This makes her my wife, as I am hers. There is no one else."

He looks down at his feet. He looks up at the moon's roof. Delicately, he hedges, "Have you considered, Lady Chang'e, that the archer is in truth a lord, and when he comes to you puts on a woman's guise to please your tastes?"

Chang'e very much would like to remain poised, graceful, unassailable. Instead she wants to strike him. "I was there when she entered the court. She's always been as she is, and must've lost count of the times she's been asked if she would like to incarnate a man."

The woodsman kneels by one of the lantern beasts and makes a pretense of patting the silk flat. "Husbands do not always tell their wives everything, goddess. On this I can attest. It's not maliciously meant; men cannot give themselves wholly to their spouses."

For a long time she looks at him. "Then it is quite fortunate I didn't marry a man, isn't it?"

"Lady Chang'e, I didn't mean to give offense. You know that."

"No," she says, "you didn't." It would profit neither of them to say that only makes it worse.

To his credit Wu Gang has done much to ensure their privacy, having built from nothing a pavilion large enough to contain a small court: embellishing and furnishing it with enough ornaments for the same. All colors, all light: the rabbit's wine steams amber, the wood is defiant red.

She takes one of the lacquered chairs, sits, and counts. Cherrywood armrests dig into her palms.

She feels her wife's arrival on her eyelids, a finger of heat down her cheeks. When she looks again Houyi is there, warm and real, a little breathless.

The first moments are always difficult: they have gotten used to over three hundred days without the other. Absence has become more familiar than presence. Neither knows what to say, how to reacquaint herself to the actuality of her wife.

Chang'e stands. They embrace and habit takes charge. Habit makes Chang'e take Houyi by the wrist, and lead her to the cushions, silk and satin the color of bridal drapes.

"There are no walls," Houyi murmurs.

"No one will watch," Chang'e says and discovers there is more than habit, that despite everything--the sheer stretch of the centuries--there is still desire. She draws her wife down with her, and for the next moments they do not speak at all.

Eventually they come to the wine, a single cup between the two of them. Chang'e straddles Houyi's lap, sipping amber heat that goes down scalding, tangerine-tart. Given their position, which they settle into as surely as key into lock, she feels awkward when she finally asks, "What have you been doing?"

"Bearing your absence without grace."

She traces a line down the archer's breast, doubling and circling back. Her palm pushes gently against Houyi's heart. "Do you still think of us as married? Or just--"

"Friends who become lovers, very briefly, once a year?" Houyi leans into her touch, eyelids fluttering against her cheek. "I have thought on it, though I feel the time differently."

"My kin are all dead."

"Yes," the archer says gently, "that's why the centuries pass unmarked for me, for I've nothing on the changing mortal earth, but for you... I've consulted many gods, many sages. Most continue to say that in a few centuries perhaps your sentence will lift, and you need only to wait it out. Obviously I disagree."

Chang'e presses her nails to the edge of her mouth. "I can't--not another century. Not another decade."

"I know." Houyi exhales. "If there's a way we will find it; if there's anything I can do I will do it, and none will stand between me and your freedom. I swear this."

Chang'e makes herself smile. She might have made herself say that she is absolute, that she has no doubts, that what is between them is steadfast as the moorings of a continent. But it was Houyi's forthrightness that first made her say, Oh, may we have a thing like marriage, might we become wife and wife? It was that, and many things besides, which Chang'e loved. Between them there can be no lies, and few secrets. So she whispers, while they're still so close their teeth are on each other's lips, the fragment of a thought she's been hoarding close to her breast.

Long after the chariot has gone Chang'e remains to watch its trail, wisps of gold that too quickly dissipate, a thin memory of stars.

2.

On earth Houyi, too, dresses like a man. But in this place of chrome and skyscrapers it is less remarkable than it once was, at a time when she was made to walk the earth in flesh susceptible to death. Having let her hair down she becomes even more ordinary, for mortal men now keep theirs very short. Some are clean-shaven entirely, even though they aren't monks.

She comes at night, when her duty relents, and haunts the ocean's side. She watches the ferries crossing the gulf between city districts: strange to think that Hong Kong and Kowloon, once very much unlike, can now be counted two parts of the same whole. It's taken her several centuries, to track as she has never before, not prey of hooves and fangs and tiger-fur, but a thin faded line of blood. A long time ago she met the mother, brother and niece of her wife, but there'd been time apart. When she looked again they were all gone.

But the hunt is Houyi's domain and delight. Though there is nothing left she could recognize, no commonality of name--for people speak differently now, and name their children differently especially on this isle--and little to see in the cast of skull and shape of eyes, she's chased the tracks of genealogy to Hong Kong.

It is not that she keeps secrets from Chang'e. But she doesn't want to hold out a false hope, when it's taken her this long, when it's this thin and flimsy a thing.

In the Space Museum it is almost empty, climate-controlled air whispering against her skin, a quiet hum of electricity. She goes past the glassed cases of spacesuits and shuttle models, the gravity well demonstration with its whirling metal spheres, the instrument panels that simulate a cockpit. But it is the photographs of lunar landings that snatch at her attention, make her linger.

"You've been showing up every other night."

She glances up, unsurprised. "You work here."

"Unfortunately." The young woman is in the process of locking down doors, dressed for the cold. Belatedly Houyi realizes she is not. "Well, we're closing soon."

They leave the museum separately, and board the same boat off Star Ferry to Wanchai. Houyi sits by the railing, where the winds buffet her hair and tear at her skin. When the young woman settles beside her, Houyi hears her frown before she even asks, "Aren't you even a little cold?"

"It doesn't bother me. You are Julienne, I think?"

Julienne's hand brushes the spot on her sweater that corresponds to where her employee's card has been. "People don't wear name tags in real life. It's awful."

"Hau Ngai."

The young woman blinks, but offers no commentary nor wonders aloud just why it is that she has a name so masculine.

* * *

Chang'e continues in testing and measuring her enemy.

With no drop of joy but plenty of grim clarity, she sets one of the houses on fire. No small feat, for the moon is cold and the building pure rock, but the rabbit keeps bottles of phoenix flame. Small collection--even in heaven the substance is rare--but she pinches one anyway, guilty but not guilty enough to seek another solution. After a stone house is reduced to blackened rubble, Chang'e finds herself unable to leave the pavilion Wu Gang built for days after. The surrounding courtyard turns in upon itself, and she can venture no further than the edges. Like an impertinent child in need of correction she has been punished.

The rabbit visits with sticky rice wrapped in ghostly lotus leaves. It plucks at its whiskers nervously. "Why did you do this?"

To that she only gives a serene smile. "What could be done to me?"

"If you wreak such ruin regularly? Banishment to earth as a mortal, or a demon. Or worse, Lady. You aren't beyond the wheel, and when it turns it can break you, pulping flesh and grinding bones. Immortal doesn't mean impervious."

Her expression tightens. "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you, rabbit."

Subsequent experimenting becomes subtler. She notes the times when she can glimpse the earth through windows, through archways. Then she might step through, and be on a mountain, in a temple, on the street of a city. She's never fast enough, but it is a close race.

So, then, what she wants to do might work. Might. As long as the symbolism, the center of story, is satisfied.

The ghost animals have neither voices nor words of their own. A few eels and frogs can be coaxed to echo Chang'e, and that suits her purposes. The trouble lies in luring them. They do not behave much like their living counterparts, neither eating nor mating; owls and starlings sometimes swim languidly in the lakes, and twice she's seen carps up in the branches of a stone cypress. She's tried to tempt them with cakes, fruits, wine, dumplings. None avails. Tatters of fabric and melted candle wax do even less.

Finally she starts giving out pieces of herself.

Clipped locks of her hair attract middling interest. She turns to pain, a hairline thread open in her hand--and they come, attending her blood like courtiers around an empress, wet toothless mouths latching onto her skin. She whispers words at them in slow stressed syllables: her name, common phrases, the way she greets the rabbit and the woodsman. Thank you and You didn't have to and The food you made is delicious. It is like reciting poetry. Conversations so repetitive she can conduct them on her own, exhausted to banality and prescribed lines.

Chang'e melts the rabbit's remedy, the one that unites spirit to body, and blends it with her blood.

The mixture takes a long time to boil, blood and medicine far thicker than water, and when she pours it into sculpted mouths too quickly it splashes and scalds her. Her eyes water at the pain. She does not allow it to slow her down.

She finishes the statue in what she imagines is winter, where the moon's lapses are more frequent and she gets to see the earth almost every day; her prison's mind turns to deserts and brightness, while hers turn to sanding and polishing.

Her features are duplicated across the carved face. No amount of paint will make it seem flesh, but she has prepared a solution for that.

She waits as the ghost animals slip into the mannequin, drawn irresistibly to arterial sweetness. Perhaps they sip at this mixture, and are content; perhaps they struggle to escape. They can't. Having imbibed the medicine they will be bound.

Hands on the shoulders of the statue she concentrates. It isn't something she'd have been able to do mortal--martial practitioners may, and she was never that--but her ascendance has bought more than imprisonment. It will cost her, for she is guided by instinct, not discipline.

A brush of vitality she can scarcely afford to spare trickles through her fingertips. With it, a fraction of herself, that which makes her Chang'e and divine. It suckles at her as though a babe, and she nurses it into a facsimile of life. When she is done her knees are weak.

She clasps the wooden doll to her, mouth to wooden mouth, "You are Chang'e."

It is silent. Only wood, sanded and painted amateurishly.

"You are Chang'e," she repeats, "and you have a wife whom every night you long to meet. You met her in heaven. Under a golden tree and black petals she first kissed you. Her name is Houyi, and you are wedded wives."

"I am," it repeats haltingly, in a voice not quite hers, "Chang'e."

Once the first word has been uttered color flourishes, wood limbs softening to skin, chiseled hair flowing into soft strands. In the best silks she has she dresses the statue, and on its head she puts pearls and ivory. When she is done she hides it deep among the ghosts, draping it in swans and lions winter-pale.

* * *

The second time Houyi sees Juliene the latter exclaims, "You can't find these things that interesting."

The archer smiles faintly. "Do you have mooncakes at Zungcauzit?"

"Of course." Julienne glances sidelong at the moon-walk box. "What does that have to do with anything?"

This time they end up at a Maxim's outlet, which even at this time of the night is crowded, noisy, and not especially glamorous. They order and have indifferent honeyed pork, dim sum, and pearl tea. Julienne wrings her sleeves and bites her lip. "I do know nicer places."

"I don't mind," Houyi says. "There's something to be said for convenience."

"You're so unpicky. Where are you from?"

"The mainland."

A disbelieving laugh, as though she believes someone who dresses as elegantly as Houyi--and her choice of attire is that, by accident--couldn't possibly have so provincial an origin. "Shenzhen? Peking?"

"I'm not much for cities." She looks across the room, where one woman--catching Houyi's gaze--stops giggling with her friends and blanches. A spider demon. Her shadow briefly flares extra limbs as she scrambles, upsetting iced tea, and excuses herself from the table. "They are too easy to hide in. But I'd rather know about you."

Julienne sets down her chopsticks. "Are you flirting with me?"

This surprises a chuckle out of Houyi. "I'm much too advanced in age for that. Old aunts shouldn't flirt with young ladies."

"You can't be more than thirty-five."

"You flatter me. But regardless I have a wife."

The girl puts the tip of a chopstick back in her mouth and chews it with a peculiar fervor. "You got married abroad, I suppose. What's her name?"

"Seung Ngo."

"Oh come on."

"That's actually her name." Houyi signals a waitress--she has to call only once to gain attention, which seems to awe Julienne disproportionately--and despite the girl's protest she pays the entire bill. "I'm about to ask you something very odd and rather personal."

"How odd can it be?" Julienne gestures with her glass, whose bottom is black with ice-trapped tapioca beads.

"Do you visit a cemetery during Chingming?"

Julienne leans away from the table. "That is a bit personal. And you aren't even single."

"I'm not that bewitching, child."

"Well, fine. I don't go. I don't owe my parents anything, not even burning them bits of shiny paper."

"Ah," the archer murmurs. There's little family resemblance; marriages, migrations, and sheer centuries have washed those out, sculpted quite something else in the place of features possessed by Chang'e. But there is, perhaps, something of the same sharpness. "I have a boon I would ask of you."

"You talk like you just stepped out of a mowhab set."

Houyi has seen her share of those films. They amuse, mostly because when gods do battle there is a great deal more fanfare than even the most ostentatious special effects. "It's hard to get out of character."

They step outside the Maxim's, into a night thick with neon signs and street vendors peddling counterfeit watches. Houyi thinks, and hopes, that Chang'e will like this place, this era. It will surely suit her curiosity.

She holds out a hand to Julienne, who frowns but takes it.

When they reappear in the silence of Che Kung the girl staggers, looks about wildly, and bites down on her knuckles. There isn't much light apart from the bulbs illuminating a shrine full of Guanyins in white and gold, clothes colorful and colorless. Houyi eases Julienne down to the lip of a blue pool, at whose center yet another Guanyin stands with child in hand.

"I'm not going," Julienne says, voice gone thin and breathy, "to scream. I'm not."

"I hoped you wouldn't."

When she has gotten herself under control Julienne demands, "What do you want from me?"

"To burn something." Houyi draws out what she's hidden by the shrine. It is caked in ashes, but undamaged: coils of silvered paper linked together, braided into a rope ladder. The length isn't anywhere near enough, objectively, but she's learned that such things are only symbols. "While thinking of a... great-aunt many times over."

Julienne takes the paper ladder in hand. "This isn't the right time, there isn't a picture, I have no incense, there isn't a grave. I don't even know her name."

"It is Seung Ngo."

"Oh," the girl says, giving a vindicated little clap, "of course. Of course your wife is the goddess on the moon and you're the archer who shot down nine suns. Does she have a pet rabbit too?"

"I wouldn't call it precisely a pet. There's also a woodsman on the moon, if you were curious."

Houyi describes Chang'e to Julienne quietly, quickly, as she makes a fire and wishes she had some skill at sketching. Julienne kneels dazed, but concentrates on Houyi's voice. She feeds the paper ladder to the flames all at once, as such things are meant to be consigned, and watches as it crumbles. That takes longer than most offerings; Houyi made the ladder strong and thick, just to be sure.

When all that remains is smoke--Julienne exclaiming how illegal it is to litter temple grounds as they have--Houyi feels as though she has emptied herself into that fire, into that rope ladder of paper, and now as the ashes drift skyward this has flitted beyond her grasp. There's nothing more she may do.

"Will I get to see whoever it is that I just burned that for? The great-aunt. Great-grandaunt."

Houyi touches the base of her throat, chasing the recall of her wife's touch. "We will see. I believe she will wish to meet you."

"She isn't a ghost?"

"Flesh and blood, and beautiful." The archer stands. "Shall I bring you somewhere else?"

"I'd hate having to explain myself to the police."

She takes the grand-niece of her wife near the Sha Tin station, in a spot quiet and empty enough that they were not seen except by a stray cat. It hisses at Houyi and turns tail, though not before she notes that its eyes are an unnatural, lambent blue.

Before she leaves Houyi allows her clothes to reweave themselves into the form she favors, a man's robe and trousers in pale blue. Bow and quiver at her back, reassuring solidity and weight against her spine.

Julienne stares at her, dumbfounded, as she presses her palm over her fist and bows to the girl in that old way mortals don't bother with anymore except at New Year. As Houyi departs she can still hear Julienne muttering something about mowhab sets.

3.

When the rope ladder appears Chang'e knows it is time.

It drapes halfway in, halfway out of her window. Touching it she knows at once whose hand wove it into shape, whose hand touched it and made the passing of it to her possible. It is still warm, as though hiding in its strands a secret heat. The length of it seems immeasurable. The strength of it feels muscular, the flexibility of it prehensile.

She sits, gripping the ladder tight, until she feels its gravity bleed into her bones.

The weight of earth. The weight, perhaps, of kinship.

Chang'e races over the roof with a lightness impossible anywhere else, toward the garden where she's hidden a part of herself. She peels away the swans and lions and tigers, the foliage and shrubs not quite real, the leaves and fruits that taste of honey and ice.

The moon is greedy and will not let her go. And there must, always, be a woman on the moon. Very well: she will give it one that never tires, one that never weeps.

She points the mannequin at the city, whispering, Go.

Child-obedient it goes, Chang'e-shaped, as she ties one end of the ladder to a roof finial. Knowing the length will not fail her, she tightens the knot until it no longer budges. Then she casts the ladder. It falls, and falls, until it stops taut.

Between the rough jagged rocks of the moon's flanks she descends. The wind slices at her, flaying-sharp, scalpels driving between her vertebrae--searing the shells of her ears--infiltrating lungs and nose. Her fingers turn numb, and freeze solid to the rope. Her skin tears. With each rung she weighs heavier.

Lunar cold recedes. She is halfway, or three-fourths of the way. It becomes very warm and, off the corner of her eye, she sees sun-struck seas, she sees fruits and treetops, a sunlit day. She sees a mountaintop nearly as close to her as her own feet.

She passes through fire. On the moon slivers of her self vibrate within their wooden cage, leaping and hissing through wooden mouths. The puppet that is her, that appears skin and hair but whose core is cherry bay, clutches itself and translates her raw flesh to amphibious pain-cries.

On the other side Chang'e is charred hair and blood fruiting on her lips, she is blisters and lymph dewing on her arms. The snow mutes and absorbs the retching of her screams. When she does stand she totters and would have pitched over again if she does not remember that she is breathing freedom, tasting it with lungs, pores, palate.

She straightens: dignity, she must have that when she does this for the first time. She has witnessed Houyi doing it without thought or effort. Back then she did not imagine she would one day gain the capability to do the same, the right of any deity. She thinks east; she thinks of bringing it close.

One step, two. Her footprints are shallow in the snow. By the fifth she's treading on sand, on the howl of tides against cliff. Saltwater laps at her waist, searing the burns on her thighs and hips. What remains of her robes drifts seaweed-heavy in the waves.

There is a little house by the shore.

Chang'e limps up the winding path she knows her wife paved: conch shells and sea-smoothed pebbles, dyed in the bright colors that Houyi loves.

The front door, double-paneled, is shut against drafts. At her touch it parts. Inside, three rooms. An enclosure for ablutions with folded screen and fish-scale tiles, an untidy workshop, and a bedroom. This last is built for two, furniture in duplicates, a pair of armoires side by side: one filled, the other empty as though in hope.

Houyi sits at the window, back straight, clad in a thin robe carelessly thrown on that leaves one shoulder bare. She turns and her breath leaves her in a long whisper. "Chang'e."

The archer spreads burn salve over her; from the familiar vegetal smell she recognizes it as the rabbit's work. When she can speak again without her face hurting she murmurs through cracked lips, "What did you do?" Her voice claws its way out a ruin, cold-wracked, fire-scourged.

"I found your family." Houyi pours her lukewarm water, keeping at arm's length as though unsure if she may touch Chang'e.

"Family." Chang'e holds her cup, presses it to her smeared cheek for relief. "I've family left?"

"Your niece had children. It took me a while to track them--they spread and went away to far lands. Some never came back; it's difficult to read their footprints." The archer brushes away what remains of her wife's hair. Charred handfuls fall out. "Her name's Julienne."

Chang'e repeats it. "What a peculiar name."

"She is of the same blood as you. Else when she burned it the ladder wouldn't have found you."

"Or let me escape." Kinship, she thinks, the surest anchor.

She looks at her wife, who has done so much, who has opened this path. "Can you," she asks uncertainly, "take me to see this girl?"

* * *

Julienne zips up her jacket and chafes her hand, wishing she'd declined the invitation to the class reunion. Her schoolmates haven't gotten any more interesting than the last time, and all the women remain--as far as she can tell--depressingly straight.

At her feet night club flyers rustle, garish things heavy on neon-pink and black. Tomorrow someone is going to be fined for littering. She stops at a 7-11 for chrysanthemum tea, a bar of chocolate, sanitary pads. Ordinary items for an ordinary life.

The MTR station is quiet, dead last-train hours and closed convenience stores. She hopes that the one night of oddity in Che Kung hasn't ruined her for a lifetime of normalcy. In a way Julienne resents that woman--whoever or whatever she was, for surely she was not thatHau Ngai--for disrupting her life. She tries not to dwell on it as she waves her card at the turnstile, goes down the escalator, and into a front carriage. The only other passenger is an older man, dozing. Yesterday's issue of the Apple Daily flutters by his side.

The smartphone in his shirt pocket chirps and shakes at the next stop. He wakes groggily, disembarks, and Julienne finds herself alone.

A hand falls on her shoulder, jerking her out of the white-noise zone born of electrical glare and the ghost of her own reflection foregrounding the tunnel rushing by. Julienne looks up to find two women. One tall, in suit and slacks. The other, astonishingly, in cheongsam. Pearls in her hair, either a net or secured by supernatural means.

The goddess is known to be exquisite.

Julienne realizes her mouth has fallen open. She shuts it.

Seung Ngo cups Julienne's face in her hands. She startles to find that the goddess' palms are not velvet; they are rough, harder than her own, as though she is a woman who works with her hands. The most menial Julienne's ever gotten is with keyboards. Carefully, as if speaking Gwongdongwa for the first time Seung Ngo says, "My wife was wrong. I do see written on you my mother and Third Niece."

Finding her voice finally she says, a little irritably, "Not my parents, I hope."

The goddess--her ancestress--lets her hands fall away. "You're your own, mostly. Will you introduce me to the rest of our clan?"

Julienne splutters a laugh. "I don't think they can take the shock."

"They don't have to know everything. And you, of course, will always be my favorite."

"Do I get the thickest red envelope?"

"Insolent child," Seung Ngo says fondly. "I'll stuff yours with gold."

A cool female voice announces that the next station is the end of the Island line. Julienne tries to imagine New Year and Chingming with all their family obligations. She's refused to show up for several years now. "Next Zungcauzit my cousins in Indonesia and Singapore are coming home. You're supposed to be on the moon by then, but..."

Seung Ngo laughs. "I'll be with you, not to worry. I've never tasted mortal-made mooncakes."

"We put ice-cream in them now. All sorts of fillings. You can even buy them off-season."

"Oh, my," the goddess says.

"But until then I've got photo albums. Of--the family. Baby pictures too. Do you want to see?"

"I'd like nothing more."

The two immortals take each of Julienne's arms, clasping her between them, and somehow they exit without needing either octopus card or ticket. Julienne knows that this year she'll attend all the family gatherings. Perhaps they won't go very well. But she will have two divine aunts with her, and isn't that worth something?

Very different, if nothing else. And never boring.

"It feels like I'm continuing a story," Julienne breathes. "You might've heard of it before."

Hau Ngai tilts her head. "And which one is that?"

"On the moon," she begins, grinning, "there's a lady with a rabbit..."

An excerpt from Scale-Bright

Julienne's aunts are the archer who shot down the suns and the woman who lives on the moon. They teach her that there's more to the city of her birth than meets the eye – that beneath the modern chrome and glass of Hong Kong there are demons, gods, and the seethe of ancient feuds. As a mortal Julienne is to give them wide berth, for unlike her divine aunts she is painfully vulnerable, and choice prey for any demon.

Until one day, she comes across a wounded, bleeding woman no one else can see, and is drawn into an old, old story of love, snake women, and the deathless monk who hunts them.

Scale-Bright is a contemporary fantasy novella published by Immersion Press with an introduction by Aliette de Bodard. Due out July 2014 in limited edition hardback, it blends Chinese myth, interstitial cities, and the difficulties of being mortal and ordinary when everyone around you has stepped out of legends.

1.1

Julienne is in a crowded train when a man whose skin gleams smooth as stone appears to inquire after her heart's desire.

He wears white paper creased into sleeves and robe, and on his head black paper folded into a cap. His faceted eyes are amber glass on an ivory face. But it is when the rush hour parts around him that his inhumanity becomes beyond dispute.

Smiling he bares blunt shoeshine teeth and again asks, "What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?"

She ignores him, gazing out the window where the tunnel blurs by in a gray-black haze. Overhead, the indicator blinks green between one station marker and the next. Fortress Hill, Tin Hau. The man disappears before her stop. The crowd flows back into the space he left behind without ever acknowledging he was there.

Afterward she does not remember what the man looks like and his words fade. This is the first strange thing she encounters that day.

(Julienne does not count her aunts as strangeIt would be rude, and they are the best relatives one could hope to have.)

In the afternoon, having spent her half-day off in pursuit of a low-calorie lunch, Julienne goes to work. Sunlight around her neck noose-tight, she encounters the second strange thing: a woman bleeding under the clock tower. She wears a vivid shade of good emeralds from eyeshadow to stiletto heels, marred by that one slash of red. The woman bears this coldly, eyes straight ahead, only now and then caught by a spasm that tautens her lips over her teeth. Her gaze catches Julienne's and holds fast. Some ten meters separate them.

Julienne looks away, hurries into the Ocean Terminal where conditioned air loosens the heat's chokehold and lets oxygen pass into her lungs again. There is a woman in so extraordinary a color; there is a woman who bleeds—and no one has noticed. So there must be no woman, or there is no blood.

Her aunts have taught her that Hong Kong is not quite the city she knows. Not half so safe; not half so dull.

She works, finishes, and has an indifferent dinner with coworkers in the food court. She buys pastel notepads and browses books at Page One, heavy hardcovers on architecture and interior design that take up far too much space to justify their purchase. The requirements of normalcy having been fulfilled, she makes her way out assured in her expertise of ordinariness. In the face of the peculiar it's best to shore herself up in an ecstasy of the mundane.

At an hour bordering on too-late, she goes back to the harbor with its familiar smells of sea and fast food, with its crowds clustering around taxi and bus stops, salt-sweat of an evening. For the length of a hesitation, she pauses before the turnstile to the Star Ferry. She goes past.

The woman remains at the precise same spot, bathed in yellow light. Blood has stained her shoes and pavement an uncertain black. She remains upright, but she has become so pale her eyes look immense, tinted as though with expensive jades ground down to dust.

When the distance between them has shortened to nothing Julienne purses her mouth, licking off her lipstick, cloying mango-scent. "Do you need help?"

The woman blinks rapidly, shaking herself out of lassitude, setting herself on the correct side of consciousness. "I thought I'd bleed out my life before you overcame your cowardice."

Julienne stares. "What?"

"You see a woman bleeding to death and don't think to give her succor until the hours have passed, the sun has set, and she could well be lifeless carcass come the night? What barbarian are you? Did your mother and father teach you no courtesy?"

She inhales slowly. "Are you going to let me—"

"Yes," the woman says, imperious, and falls into Julienne's arms: a weight of green like emeralds, a smell of butchery thick as velvet.

* * *

The woman's clothes have browned in the way of wilting leaves. She is congealed heat against Julienne on the ferry, on the taxi, then in the elevator ride up to her apartment. Strangers' opprobrium chases Julienne; she must look like she's shouldering a friend drunk into stupor.

In Julienne's arm the woman is light, as though acrylic on cardboard, bold strokes and bright splashes without dimension. Julienne chews on the possibility that this is a ghost, the possibility that this woman-seeming will fall apart to wood and fabric. She guards against this thought. As long as it is out of sight it won't come true.

Her door is numpad-secured. At her old place it'd have been an ugly lock and fumbling with keys, but her aunts can afford seemingly anything.

She thumbs the light on and lays the woman down on a faux-leather sofa, then props herself against the wall. Her arms ache and she can't think. At the sight of handprints she's left on the switches and door her stomach churns.

Under the tap cold water numbs her skin, sluicing pink. It occurs to her while she lathers her hands that the woman might already be dead. How many liters of blood in a body? Is it different when she is so obviously not human? There's a medicine cabinet in the living room. Aspirins, indigestion pills, bandages. She can't begin to imagine what she could do with them.

Logic slowly reasserts itself: an ambulance. "We should've gone to a hospital," she says aloud in the shredded hope that the woman might still be alive and aware. "I'll just make a call. All right?"

The woman reaches for her. "Don't."

"You need an ambulance."

"No." A weak tug. "Stay."

"You're going to die and it'll be on my head."

"I'm not; it won't be." A small, desperate noise. She never opens her eyes.

Gradually her breathing evens out and she eases into what seems more sleep than unconsciousness. Feeling absurd Julienne continues to hold the stranger's hand, her fingers a twitch away from dialing 999.

A minute passes, or an hour. Morning arrives with an odd abruptness. Julienne is in her bed; on the nightstand her phone flashes. For a while Julienne stares blankly at the LED blinking orange, white, orange, white. A slant of sun peers through the curtains, glares off the floor-length mirror in its art-deco frame.

She stays under the blanket until she can no longer bear the disgusting thickness in her mouth. The air-con hums; she doesn't remember having switched it on. She touches her blouse where the stains have faded to thin smears, as though they were never blood.

Toothbrush, toothpaste, nightrobe. The clock says half past five. She tries to recall what it said when she came home last night. Eleven?

Her skin feels much too cold, the robe much too warm. When she steps into the living room she braces herself against anything, the way she does at general check-ups: against news of sugar level too high, blood pressure too low. Cysts. Cancer.

But there is just her aunt-in-law reading on the sofa. A faint smell of cigarettes. Hau Ngai takes care not to smoke indoors, and never near Julienne. She sits like a man, ankle propped on knee, in a way Julienne would never dare. "Julienne. How do you feel?"

"I'm not sure." She tries again. "Auntie." Five months of saying that and still awkward.

"Sit."

She takes the wingback chair, flinches when Hau Ngai leans over to cradle her face in a hand rough with calluses. The pressure behind her eyes lightens and the throbbing in her temple slows. What little sunlight there is stops strobing in her vision.

"I've lent you some vitality. Tell me what transpired."

"Oh." Julienne looks down. She has never grown past the embarrassment at the deep, intoxicating attraction she felt when she first met Hau Ngai, not knowing who this older woman was, understanding only that she was elegant and impossibly self-possessed. "There was a woman."

As Hau Ngai listens her mouth becomes thinner and thinner until she's lost all expression. "Did it not occur to you, niece, that there was anything strange? Of all mortals she singled you out. Hong Kong is not small, the crowd was not thin. If it was aid she sought, then she went about it strangely."

"I... know, Auntie. I wasn't thinking clearly. But she was harmless. I couldn't have walked by."

"She drank your youth, a few years torn out from the weave of your span. Your charity's to your credit, but what you brought home was malicious; a viper, unless I've misread the signs. Reptiles are beguiling." Hau Ngai shakes her head. "I'll call Seung Ngo."

"I don't want her to worry—"

"Your aunt won't forgive me if I did not tell her. But I'll do that tomorrow, if that eases you."

Julienne pushes herself to say, "I know I'm a burden to you both."

"You wouldn't have been attacked if they didn't smell gods on you. It's irresistible to demons who extend their centuries by leeching off humans' time. For them the scent of heaven is spice to such a meal. This isn't your fault. It's appalling that neither of us has granted you better protection." Hau Ngai reaches into her shirt and draws out a small metal triangle. "Keep this. Through it I'll know where you are, and be able to answer if you call."

The tip is weighted, tapering to a piercing point. An arrowhead. "Thank you, Auntie."

"It's no chore to keep you safe," Hau Ngai says. "You're my wife's niece, and that makes us family."

Which to Julienne simply sounds like it's an obligation, but she tries not to think that way. Gratitude is the only correct answer; she attempts a smile. "When I was a child I'd have loved to be able to say my aunts were thatSeung Ngo, thatHau Ngai. Bragging rights."

Between curtain-cast shade and dawn-light the archer god might have smiled. "Then other children would've said you meant your aunt and uncle, called you a liar, and pelted you with whatever mortal children pelt one another with these days."

"Rocks and mud balls, I'm afraid." She yawns and stifles it behind her hand.

This time Hau Ngai chuckles as she lifts Julienne in her arms without effort. "Mortals," she says as she tucks Julienne back into bed, "never truly change."

* * *

When Houyi makes the call to her wife she expects an argument and, as so often, that is what she gets.

"If you weren't out to butcher every single demon in Hong Kong." The intake of Chang'e's breath is an effort to keep calm. Houyi imagines her in a park, a field, somewhere under an open sky gold-blue with daylight. "If you didn't have this reputation for being a rampaging zealot who massacres indiscriminately. If not for these, do you believe one of them would've been after my niece's life?"

"Yes," Houyi says, rebalancing the phone. "Demons hardly need encouragement to act on their instincts. Scenting us on her is reason enough."

"They aren't animals."

"Technically many of them are."

Another sharp inhalation. "I'm not going to debate the technicalitiesof demonkind. Had you left them well enough alone instead of heading out every other night to slaughter them by the score they'd have found no provocation to do this."

"This is the first time they've gotten close to Julienne."

"They don't need a second. I'm not going to expect her to defend herself from demons."

"I could teach her to, but in the meantime I've given her something to carry. I do mean to keep her safe."

"I know you do; I know you will keep her well. Sometimes I feel like I ran away and left you with an illegitimate child to raise." On the other end Houyi hears an old woman's voice raised in song. Clacking of wood on wood, the purr of thread turning to fabric. "It's not that I don't wish I was at your side. It's not that I don't resent how little time we have together."

"I understand that. When this has calmed down, I will..." The strength of her reaction to Chang'e—to her wife's absence—always catches Houyi off-guard, like a shot that's gone astray without reason. "I'll find the viper. Perhaps negotiate an agreement."

Chang'e laughs, without humor. "That'd be new. Do try it, even so."

The last echo of Chang'e's voice dies away.

Houyi stands on the first letter of HSBC, ancient myth-feet resting on logo black on red, under which throbs a mad rush of numbers and commerce and machines: trades riding cellular waves and fiber optic, fortunes made and shattered in minutes. She does not shade her eyes. Centuries of driving the sun chariot have inured her; the light and heat only remind her of the trajectory, the making of dark into dawn. It's not a duty she may shirk for much longer.

The height gives her half of Hong Kong to peel open, but though she can see as far as she needs—and narrow her attention where she wills—the city is a hoarder of secrets, of blacked windows sealed tight, and what do reptiles excel at if not hiding and slithering in the shade?

Houyi pinches the strand of hair she's plucked out of the sofa. No scales: the demon was not so slovenly as that, to revert to fangs and a tail as long as skyscraper shadows. From her shoulder Houyi unslings her bow, and choosing an arrow knots the hair to its tip.

Notch. Pull. Loosen. The motions come easily, an extension of arms and fingers, a release of tension pleasant-familiar as nostalgia. The arrow sails high. It flashes once, a verdant burst.

A direction; a beginning. She has located the trail.

Houyi steps off the edge of the building, and follows.

* * *

Temple Street at night: too many foreigners, too many smells. Billboards warm the air even in winter, and in summer it is sweltering. Here is too far from waves and harbor, too far from the breathing brine.

A street opera enacts snatches of drama—behind the powder and paint each actor could be woman, man or elsewise. One plays the part of Daji, Nuwa's fox, luring an emperor to her embrace and his dynasty's demise. Houyi appreciates their grace, their ability to perform in the limited stage eked out from gaps between pedestrians and stalls. The actors are not without aptitude, and the accompanying band if strident manages to spin noise into poetry. But she will not find her quarry here. Too obvious, too garish.

Vendors hawk stringed coins not unlike what young men used to buy during imperial examinations seasons. Zodiac animals in glaring gilt line tables cheek-to-jowl with paper-mache icons of Chairman Mao. Houyi lets the crowd carry her forward, moving at its pace rather than her natural gait. Intuition and hunter's sense will serve her here, not tracks on asphalt. None exists in any case; the city fleets, overwriting and overwritten.

She drops onto a cracked plastic stool without invitation or solicitation. The palm-reader looks up at her, startled to find someone who looks so obviously local giving her patronage. She is mid-forties, tired and trying to hide behind cosmetics: young for a palm-reader, which indicates that like most lining this street she is better at reciting a chiromancy manual than reading fate-lines. For foreigners' benefit the woman wears a cheongsam.

Clipped palm charts flutter as she unhooks her magnifying glass. The smile she gives Houyi is thin-lipped, impatient. "Good evening, miss. Is there anything specific you're after?"

Houyi hands over a couple hundred-dollar bills. "A consultation," she says amiably; even if the palm-reader knows no talent, she will see that Houyi's lines are not quite what they should be. They would suggest Houyi has already died once, an interruption in the tributaries of her destiny. "I've had a reading done before, but it wasn't favorable. I'm considering a surgery to change that. Do you have recommendations?"

An honest chiromancer would have told her the idea is absurd, but this one apparently has a plastic surgeon for a brother-in-law and has pages of advice on what Houyi might want to change, which part to keep and which to overwrite—"The one for your lifespan of course, and if you have conjugal troubles..."

Houyi's smile stiffens. So she has. Such a mortal thing, to turn a corner and find uncertainty lying in ambush against understanding that has outlasted dynasties.

While the woman speaks she takes the opportunity to acquaint herself with table, charts, equipment, brushing her fingertips over the naked lightbulb. The viper has been here, and often; the deep pouches under the palm-reader's eyes are not just sleep deprivation. A touch here, a touch there, like a tongue lapping at a teacup's lip.

She lets the barest sliver of her vigor seep into the woman. Chang'e will not like it, berating her for being too much the god, too free with her protection. These days it seems they are constantly in the middle of a disagreement or verging on the next. Just as well they found Julienne already a woman grown, not a fifteen-year-old orphan, or they would have worse debates over how to rear the girl. Neither of them would have adjusted well to the parameters of parenthood.

She pays the palm-reader an additional fifty, far more than the "consultation" is worth, and leaves for a noodle shop. It is noisy, far too hot, and quite perfect for contemplation. In her days she would have found a remote spot, drawn weapons, and sharpened them—but remoteness in Hong Kong is a commodity rarer than gold and far more precious. She's learned to align her thoughts to noise, to sharpen her alertness on the whetstone of distraction. The steam brings her the smells of red pork, soy sauce and pak choi.

The god's intent pricks her skin long before he enters the eatery.

"Marshal Tianpeng," she says as he arrives along with the waiter, who sets out a bowl of noodle and a plate of youtiao she didn't order.

"Nobody's called me that for eons. Zhu Baije, these days. Your courtesy is peerless, as ever."

Physically he is imposing: a former commander of some eighty-thousand celestial soldiers can be nothing less. But his presence, she's always felt, is very small. Houyi regards him in silence, long enough for him to begin fidgeting with his youtiao.

"Beautiful Houyi," he wheedles, "why so cold? Are we not friends of old?"

"You were sent to earth in swine form for making unwanted advances toward my wife. Though I see, of course, that you've since regained a shape more manlike." She tries a spoonful of soup, finds it insipid. The beef brisket is an improvement, seasoned and braised with a sure hand, someone with a zeal for strong flavors.

"That was centuries ago!"

"You were entirely aware that not only was Chang'e married, she didn't want men in general, nor you in especial; you didn't even take the trouble of becoming a woman to woo her. I'm concerned that she couldn't protect herself—as is obvious, she could and did—but I'm unable to comprehend why you've decided to join me for a meal."

"Chang'e seemed lonely, and at the time you were absent from heaven..."

"Banished to mortality in the human realm, yes. Very humorous, if you think about it, given your own sentence. But I wasn't aware the absence of one partner signals a marriage's dissolution. Not that I have ever leafed through a book of heavenly laws, to be sure. Perhaps you can enlighten me."

He holds up his hands. "How cross are you, truly?"

"Marshal, can you not tell? Here I understood you were the final authority on women's fickle moods. Indeed reports say that ficklewas what you called my wife when His Majesty summoned you for judgment."

"Centuries—"

"We're all immortal, Marshal. Pretend that I am a man. Your equal, if you will. Would you expect a husband to let pass this slight?"

Tianpeng looks down at his plate, shredded remains of youtiao: fried dough going limp in a cooling puddle of oil. "Houyi, your words cut deep."

"They don't need to. I do carry weapons. But to save us both time and keep up some semblance of manners you could tell me your reason for having sought me out."

"Ah," Tianpeng says. "Ah. About that. I have what mortals would call a... liquidity problem."

One of the waiters is scowling in their direction. They've kept their table too long. "We can talk as we walk. If you must."

Food smells linger on them. From the marshal she catches a cloying hint of cigars. An odd choice, and no suggestion of liquor. The Tianpeng she knew in heaven was so fond of drinks he offered to dig her a wine lake as wedding gift.

The market has frayed with the lateness of the hour; stalls are packing up and the opera troupe is gone, leaving behind synthetic feathers and tatters of faux silk, a promise of the next performance. Come daylight the street will have acquired a seediness, an emptiness of spirit that comes with storefronts shut like clenched fists and garbage bags on the footpath.

She stops at an apothecary to buy candied dates for Chang'e, then remembers that Chang'e is not here, will not be here for a long time. She buys them anyway; they will keep, and her wife always eats compulsively after she's off a plane. "Liquidity problems," Houyi says as they pass a bakery offering the last of its egg tarts at half price. "Do I understand that right, Marshal? You have financial troubles. How did you come by them? You're a god."

"Mercy and pity, Houyi! A pig for three hundred years."

"It's been how long since—" She glances at him sideways. "No, don't tell me. You've been trying to purchase women's attentions."

Tianpeng rubs the side of his temple. "Of all people you can surely appreciate that! Chang'e is unmatched in beauty, but one can't possibly be enough. It does no harm to have many loves."

"Marshal, I suggested that you pretend I'm a man as a rhetorical bid—one I hoped would bring you a glimmer of self-awareness. This seems to have met with abject failure. Iunderstand the virtue of fidelity. I enjoy it." Houyi shifts the phantom weight of her quiver. "But I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your plight. Are you acquainted with demons?"

The god tugs at his beard, uneasy. "Not by choice. This is an infested city."

"Yes, it is rather. If you can introduce me to one who might speak with me regarding a specific demon, it'd go some way to make amends for the slight you offered my wife. We can discuss your bank accounts after that."

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew lives in Hong Kong, where she is inspired to write love letters to strange cities, history, and the future. She writes fantasy mythic and contemporary, science fiction space operatic and military, and has a strong appreciation for beautiful bugs.

Her short fiction can be found in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, Dangerous Games, Solaris Rising 3 various Mammoth Books and best of the year collections. She is a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her stories have made appearances on the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her debut novella Scale-Bright is out now from Immersion Press.

She can be found online at beekian.wordpress.com and twitter.com/bees_ja

