The Kin

He did not leave at first light. He told himself he would wait for the rain to stop. The rain, as if it had been asked, went on three more days. On the fourth day the sun came out, and the house in the morning light looked even less like a place you could leave.

On the morning of the fifth, old Mr. Hu found him in the courtyard. Feng was trying to shake the last drops of water out of his scrolls. The old man said without preamble: You know what we are, don't you, scholar? You have known since the dog barked.

Feng looked up. The old man was not afraid. Just tired. The way a face gets tired when it has held the same truth for a long, long time and is tired of holding it alone.

You live among the hills, Feng said. You keep to yourselves. The courtyard is always swept. The wine is always spiced, and no one in the valley seems to have heard of you. I have read the same books you have.

We are foxes, old Mr. Hu said. He said it simply, the way you'd say the color of your coat. The line is an old one. My father before me was a fox, and his father before him. We have never done a human any harm that we did not first ask forgiveness for.

Feng set his scroll down. A fox, his books said, could be a thief or a teacher, a beauty or a terror. Depended on the fox. Depended on the human. He looked at the old man, thought of Qingfeng pouring the wine, finishing the line of poetry. He did not feel afraid.

I am sorry for it, old Mr. Hu said. I did not tell you before because men who are told too soon leave in the night. But there is a thing you should know now, and then you may go, and I will not blame you.

The reason we keep to these hills is not our own. There is a hunter in the next valley, a man with a Daoist charm about his neck, who has sworn to break our line by the next full moon. He has three of us already in his traps. We are, I think you will agree, fewer than we were.

Feng did not speak. He thought of Qingfeng's face that night the dog barked. The way she looked into her bowl and said nothing. Now he understood. She had known the hunter was coming. She had not told him because she hoped he would leave before he had reason to care.

And there is a law among my people, old Mr. Hu went on, that I will not hide from you. A human who loves one of us may stand between the hunter and the line, if he is willing. The charm will not touch a living human, only what the charm names. It is the oldest protection we have, and the rarest, because it asks a human to risk what he is.

Feng looked at the old man. At the door Qingfeng had come through that first night, carrying the wine. And he thought of the clerkship in the distant yamen. A week ago it had looked like the whole of his future.