The Road Home

Yan watched from the gate, and when Ning slung the bundle over his shoulder, the swordsman nodded to him once, in the old, hard way. Go, he said. The thing is dead, but the road is long, and a ghost is only as safe as the person who carries her. I will see you to the edge of the village, and then we go our separate ways.

They walked together through the morning, Yan with his sword across his back, Ning with his bundle light against his chest. At the village edge, Yan stopped and held out his hand, and the two men, who had known each other less than two days, clasped hands the way old soldiers do.

She is good, Yan said. Do not make her regret the one kind thing she ever did. Ning promised, and Yan turned and went back down the road, and was gone among the trees. Ning walked on, carrying a dead girl's bones, and the road was no longer the thing he had feared.

As he walked, he felt her near him, though he could not see her in the daylight. It was not a feeling of dread. It was the feeling of someone walking beside him, keeping pace, grateful. He talked to her as he walked, about his family, about the small house he kept, about the sick mother who waited for him at home. She listened, the way she had listened at the fire.

By the time he reached the edge of his own country, he had told her almost everything there was to know about him. He had never spoken to anyone so freely, and he had never felt so little alone. The dead girl's bones rode light against his chest, and he carried them as gently as a man carries a promise.

The first night on the road he put up at a small inn, and the landlord gave him a room at the end of the passage, away from the other guests. Ning said nothing. He understood, after a while, that the bundle on his chair gave off a cold that the living do not care to sit beside, and that the innkeeper, without knowing why, had chosen to be kind to him anyway.

Xiaoqian spoke little on the road, but when she spoke it was of the things a girl remembers: the house she had grown up in, the river she had played by, the brother who had carried her on his shoulders when she was small. She had not thought of these things in years, she said, until there was someone to remember them to.

They crossed a country that had been hard to travel, and Ning kept to the smaller roads, where he would not be asked too many questions. The winter held off; the days were long and bright. He walked at the same pace he had always walked, but the distance seemed shorter now, because he was not walking it alone.

Once, at a crossing, a farmer child ran out beside the road and stared at the bundle on Ning shoulder, and laughed, and waved, as though it had seen something it liked. Ning did not know what the child had seen, but Xiaoqian, he thought, smiled. He did not ask her, and she did not tell him, and between them they left the child behind and went on.

So he came at last to the hills he knew, and then to the village where his mother waited, and the smoke of his own kitchen went up into the evening air. The dead girl bones rode light against his chest. He had kept his word to a ghost, and the ghost, without asking anything of him at all, had kept him company for the whole way home.