Free River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay Page B

give voice to it. There are risks to doing so, changing times make for changing fortunes, but it is still not the same as what lies ahead of you.”
    She feels chastened, and yet oddly reassured, sustained. He
sees
her. She makes herself meet his gaze. “Is this how you always respond when a woman offers you—”
    A third time he stops her, a lifted hand this time. Not smiling. She is silent, waits.
    He gives her (she will always remember it that way) a gift. “No woman, or man, has ever offered quite what you just have. I would destroy the gift by accepting it. It is necessary, for both of us, that I leave you now. Please believe I am honoured beyond words or deserving, and that I will be equally honoured to read your writing when you choose to send it to me.”
    Shan swallows hard. Hears him say, “You are now another reason why I intend to survive Lingzhou and return. I would like to watch you live your life.”
    â€œI don’t …” She is finding it difficult to speak. “I don’t think I will be so much worth watching.”
    His smile, celebrated, harnessed to the intransigence of courage. “I think you will,” says Lu Chen.
    He bows to her. Does it twice. Walks from the room.
    Closes the door quietly behind him.
    She stands where she has been standing. She is aware of her breathing, the beating of her heart, is conscious of her body in a new way. She sees the lamp, the books, flowers, the bed.
    One difficult breath. Her mouth a thin line of determination. She
will
not live the life others choose for her.
    She crosses the room, opens the door.
    The hallway is dark but the light from her room spills into it. He turns at the sound, a figure in the corridor, halfway along. She steps into the hallway. She looks at his dark shape in the shadows the world offers her (offers all of them). But there is light. Behind her in the room, and sometimes there may even be light ahead. He has stopped. She can see he has turned to look at her. There will be light for him to see her, where she stands.
    â€œ
Please?
” she says.
    And extends a hand, holding it out towards the shape of a good man, in the darkness of a house that is not hers, and a world that is.

CHAPTER III
    M ilitary Officer Zhao Ziji, attached to a garrison in Hsiang Prefecture in the central rice lands south of the Great River, was sweating in hidden leather armour as his party walked through midsummer heat.
    He wore a wide-brimmed merchant’s hat and a rope-belted hemp tunic over loose trousers as a disguise. His throat was dry as a desert bone, and he was ferociously angry with the lazy incompetents he was shepherding north like so many lambs through dangerous country towards the river. He was unable, in fact, to think of many occasions when he had been less happy.
    Perhaps as a boy, when his sisters had seen him urinating once and had begun making jokes about the size of his private parts. He had beaten them both for it, which was his right, but that never stopped mockery once it started, did it?
    You had to go off when you were old enough and do something reckless: join the army in a district far from home, to get entirely away from such laughter and the nicknames based on it. Even then you could lie in your cot in a barracks and imagine someone from home arriving in the morning, joining your company, and greeting you with a cheerful “Hai, Ziji Shortcock!” thereby afflicting your life here, too.
    It wasn’t even
true
, for one thing. Not one singing girl had ever commented! Nor had any soldier, pissing beside him in a field or a latrine, raised an eyebrow, in any of the companies he’d served with or led. It had been utterly unfair for the girls to say such things about an eleven-year-old.
    One of his sisters was dead, he’d wish or think no ill of her, for fear of rousing a ghost. The other was married to a man Ziji understood to be harsh with her when he drank, and had a