The East Room

Wang Du thanked the innkeeper and asked, instead, to be put in the east room. The innkeeper crossed himself and refused three times; but Wang Du was calm, and paid twice the usual price, and the man, who needed the money, at last showed him the room himself.

The chamber was small, with a paper window and a bed of straw. There was nothing in it that was not in any other room of the inn, and yet the air in it felt older. Wang Du lit his lamp, spread his roll of writing on the table, and waited.

He did not have long to wait. At the second watch, when the lamp was at its shortest, he heard the soft pad of feet outside the door, and then a woman's voice, low and sweet, calling his name. He did not answer. He took the mirror from his breast and held it, covered, in his hand.

The door creaked open. A young woman in pale robes stood in the doorway, her hair loose, her eyes bright with a light that was not quite human. She smiled and called him by a name that was not his own. Wang Du rose, uncovered the mirror, and held it up between them.

The effect was instantaneous. The woman's smile froze; the light in her eyes wavered. She looked at the mirror, and then at her own hands, and Wang Du saw her fingers lengthen and darken, her face narrow into a muzzle, the robes fold and shift into the shaggy flank of a fox. She gave a high, sharp cry and fled through the wall, leaving nothing behind but a single pale hair on the threshold.

Wang Du put the mirror away. He sat down and finished his tea, his hands steady now. Outside, the inn had woken; he heard the innkeeper running, and voices calling.

He told the man, in the morning, what had happened. The innkeeper crossed himself again and crossed himself a third time, and then brought out a flagon of his best wine and would take no money for it. "Three seasons," he said, "three families have left my house in fear. I thought I should have to burn the room. You have done what the monks in the temple could not."

Word traveled. By the third day, a woman from a farmhouse outside the town had come to the inn, leading her daughter, a girl of sixteen who had been wasting away for half a year. The doctors had bled her and given her bitter drafts, and she was no better. The woman had heard that the stranger with the mirror could see what a doctor's hands could not.

Wang Du protested that he was no doctor. The woman said, simply, that she had nothing left to lose. He looked at the girl — pale, listless, her eyes already far away — and he thought of the old man's promise. He had promised not to use the mirror for power. He had not promised to keep it from the sick.

He drew it out.