The Woman at the Fire

Ning told himself he had dreamed the singer. He broke his fast on the last of his bread, packed his bundle, and made to leave the temple and be on his way. But the road was choked with dust, and a storm was building on the horizon, and his prudence, which had served him so well, told him to wait out the heat of the day.

He settled back into the temple and read from his book through the long afternoon. The storm broke at sunset, a great wall of rain that drummed on the broken roof and turned the courtyard to mud. The light went grey, and the temple closed in around him like a room.

And then, as the rain slackened, the woman came again. She came from the inner court without sound, her feet making no print in the mud, and she stood at the edge of his fire as she had done the night before.

This time she did not look away. She met his eyes, and Ning saw that her face was not merely beautiful; it was careful, the face of someone who has rehearsed a kindness a thousand times until it has become her own. She bowed her head.

I have disturbed your rest, she said, in a voice so low he had to lean forward. I did not mean to. I walk these courts because I have nowhere else left to walk. Ning, to his own surprise, was not afraid. He was only sorry for her.

He asked her name. She told him she was called Xiaoqian, and that she had lived near these temples when she was alive, and had been buried in the graveyard behind the hall. She said it simply, as one says the weather, and Ning understood, and did not cry out, and did not run.

Why do you walk here? he asked. She looked at the fire for a long moment. Because I am made to, she said. There is something in this temple that does not let me rest. It sends me out to find men who travel alone, and when they have let me near them, it takes what it wants from them, and leaves what it does not want.

Ning felt the cold settle over him, but he kept his voice steady. And you have come to me, he said. She nodded. I came to you, she said, because I had no choice. But you did not look at me the way the others look. You were sorry for me before you were afraid. I have not had that from a man in a long, long time.

She told him, then, the whole wretched story: how she had died young, far from her people, and how a thing that lived in the dark of the temple had taken her in, and bound her, and used her beauty as a hunter uses a decoy. She had done terrible things, she said, not because she wished them, but because she was made to.

And yet, she said, I did not do this one to you. I came to the edge of your fire, and I sang my song, and I waited for you to call me closer. And you did not. You lay still, and you were kind, and something in me that I thought had died years ago woke up, and I could not bring myself to finish what I had been sent to do.

Ning looked at her, and he saw now what he had not seen in the dark: that her hands were folded as a dead girl's hands are folded, and that she did not breathe, and that the firelight passed through her sleeves. She was a ghost. She had always been a ghost. And she had spared him.

There is a man in this temple, she said quickly, a man with a sword. He has gone out now, but he will return before the third watch. The thing that serves me is afraid of him, and it will not come while he is near. But when he leaves, it will come for you, and it will not be merciful the way I was.

Then she did a thing Ning never forgot. She knelt in the mud of the courtyard, though mud did not cling to her, and she pressed her hands together and asked him, in the small, worn voice of someone who has begged for centuries, to find her bones and carry them home, and lay them in a proper grave among her people. She asked for nothing else. She asked only, at the end of the world, for a place to rest.