Xi inhaled a mouthful of golden feathers. The was no better smell in the world, no warmer place. The mighty wings enveloped him: he was home at last. The bird ruffled his hair in turn, tugged a strand to its full length, then rearranged it, like a magpie building a nest. "You are feathering out nicely, chick."

He rolled his head back, smiling up at her. "Flatterer." He did not recognize the woman's face that smiled back at him from the craning bird's neck, but the warmth in her eyes was unsettling. No, it was not the warmth. It was the colour. The woman-bird's eyes were gray of the ponds when it rains, something he rested his mind-gaze upon when the demons had been tearing his hsin-shield to shreds. How deep she could look into him through their bond had never bothered him before.

Xi stumbled back, and back to reality. Chilly claws of premonition seized him by the throat, threatening to tear it out.

"Where is... where is Sister Sayewa?"

Fenghuang's face morphed, growing back the beak, eyes rounding into crystalline buttons.

"Come with me."

They rarely walked together lately, Xi having a hard time matching the hopping of the giant bird without jogging once Fenghuang outgrew him.

This time he ran.

Fenghuang chose a sheltered gulley in the cliffside to build her nest. Sister Sayewa sat in a wicker cocoon attached to the side of the cliff, looking out at the Jade Sea. The breeze stirred her hair, throwing handfuls of pink petals against the mossy rock face.

"Sister!" Xi exclaimed, his heart pounding against his rib cage from the last desperate dash up the hill. "Ancestors be praised, you are well!"

He started laughing with relief, but laughter died down on his lips when she did not respond. The faery did not acknowledge his presence, or the Fenghuang's. She kept staring out at the sea.

"She was like this since Tarkan," Fenghuang told him. "If I move her, she moves, if I sat her down, she seats, if I put food into her mouth, she chews... but she does not speak or move on her own. Rustam Bei is away, and I did not want to fly into the city so soon after the Ageless Empress's blessing."

"Thank you for looking after her." Xi took the faery's hand and pulled at it awkwardly. "Please, Sister, let us leave."

Sayewa rose and stepped towards him like automation performing a dance. Her four eyes stared through him.

Fenghuang extended her wing to help them climb her back. "Where do you want me to take you? It cannot be very far with the two of you."

"My mother," Xi replied with a sheepish realization that the last time he said something like that was when he was four. "She will know what to do."

The magic bird spiralled down from the cliff top in minutes, the distance that took him an hour to climb this morning. It should have taken less, but he kept switching to a run even on the steepest portions of the trail driven forward by the gusts of the crisp salty air from the sea, and the excitement. That turbulent wind beat against his face, jumbling his thoughts together on top of leaving him breathless. Even his heartbeat sped up inexplicably as if he did not know how to control it. Exasperated, he would force himself into minutes of perfect stillness, then to walking at a steady pace until he would succumb to the temptation of yet another mad dash.

Now he had to lie still, cradling Sayewa to his chest to avoid spilling her from the bird's back, and his heartbeat still raced. His empathic senses picked fear from Sayewa, but little else. It floated on the surface, preventing him - or someone more sinister - from digging deeper. Then hair raised at the nape of his neck. The faery must be frightened to lose a single crumb of her hard-won knowledge, he thought. She must have been afraid of her mind being taken apart by the demons, thought by thought, that's why she had retreated inward, coiled tightly around her hoard.

"Faster, my enigma," he murmured.

"Shall I drop you to lighten my load?" Fenghuang asked out of one side of her beak. "I am sure you will make up time swimming to the shore."

"I am sorry. I must be going mad."

Fenghuang veered to the left, then jerked back, making Sayewa roll onto him, the petals from her hair spilling over his face, a thousand of fragrant touches. He gripped fistfuls of feathers with one hand, wrapping the other arm around the faery.

The bird's apprehension drove through his gut like a spear, but her voice remained flippant. "Pull yourself together, beloved. Go insane all you want, but after I set you down."

He did not reply, focusing on a simple mantra until Fenghuang had finally put them on the roof of the teahouse where his mother took rooms.

"Thank you!" he called after her, as she took off again because a child's reedy voice started screaming in the street. At least they brought a miracle to someone in Sutao.

His mother came out to the courtyard fully dressed despite the early hour.

"Mother!" he chided from his high perch. "You have to start sleeping, or you'll waste away like Yu. Ancestors, you look halfway there already."

"Thank you for the compliment, son," Tien Lyn replied, caressing the pistol's handle. "Are you staying there, or will you be coming down for some tea?"

"I need your help," Xi said, and explained in as few words as possible the problem with Sayewa.

A grove deepened between his mother's brows, but she said nothing and received the plump faery into her embrace with barely a step backwards for balance. Xi jumped off the roof next to the women. "Have you done this sort of thing before?"

His mother made a noncommittal noise, drawing Sayewa inside the inn, her arm draped around the faery's waist. "We will need a carriage for her. Wait until I have one readied."

"Yes, Mother." Xi slumped against the wall in relief. His heart beat as evenly as ever, and his thoughts stopped scattering around like cockroaches when a cook lights a lamp in the kitchen

While the carriage made its way through the winding streets of Sutao towards the Hill of the Five Seasons, Xi realized that he did not have to run to his mother. He should have taken Sayewa to the faery monastery himself.

The only reason this simple plan did not occur to him was the deep-seated mistrust Rustam held for the priestesses. The faeries fought on the deposed Emperor's side in the civil war after all. His mother also suffered in the war, but she did not hesitate to go to the oldest temple in the Evershining Empire. She looked grim but held Sayewa close in a sisterly embrace. Xi remembered handing Sayewa down from the roof and sighed wistfully. How many misfortunes did the trio weather together in the faraway lands? How many adventures?

"I hope you will tell me of your time on the Sunset Road."

She patted his knee. "I will, baby, once the times are less... interesting."

"A small chance of that."

That earned him a tired smile. "One day."

***

The gaggle of faery acolytes who tended the flower beds in the outer courtyard went running at the sight of them. Seeing their shocked faces Xi whispered, "Mother, perhaps you could hide the Gracious Judgment?"

"It is not the pistol that scared them," she said dryly. Her grip on Sayewa changed from sisterly to be more like that of a warrior holding a shield.

"What was it then?"

"One day, Xi."

She did not call him 'baby' this time, so asking was not a waste of breath.

After a short while, the faeries returned, looking more subdued with an invitation to enter the Temple of Serene Joy, the heart of the monastery.

The gravel paths were as meticulously swept as in the Imperial Palace, but the profusion of colour belied a gardener who had a different idea of beauty, preferring the wild abundance to the balanced lines and the restful green. The flowers filled every gap: tiny bluebells in the grooves of the stonework, tall hollyhocks lining the narrow strips of dirt between the pathways and the walls, the dahlias and the nasturtiums in every nook and cranny, and the gleaming lotus flowers in the barrels.

Outside the monastery, the spring was at its most bountiful, but most of the blooms he spotted around him should not have been in season. The Hill was the faery land by the decrees more than five millennia old, and over the centuries the faeries changed the land itself.

Xi waded ankle-deep through the blossoms heaped on the temple steps to enter into the hall of full of golden light, painted with the colours brighter than jewels.

It all paled in his eyes when Serene Mother turned to face them.

She was taller and more graceful than a willow tree, the resemblance increased by her dark skin and tresses falling all the way to the floor, dotted with blade-shaped leaves. She set the three of her eyes on them, and the fourth - on the painting of demons being hacked to pieces by the First Emperor and his two faery wives. It did nothing to diminish her beauty.

"Get out, demon's whore. You foul the hallowed ground." The radiance dimmed. The jade-green of the faery's eyes deepened nearly to black.

His mother's knuckles, by contrast, whitened on her pistol's handle. "If you had me brought in for the pleasure of throwing me out, Weynala, you might as well hear what I have to say."

The Serene Mother indicated Sayewa. "I do not wish to breathe your stench to find out why you brought back the heretic."

"Kai's son is dead."

Tien Lyn's cryptic words had an effect. The Serene Mother - Weynala - seemingly stretched out and over, hovering above them like a threatening shadow. "You lie. I sense his qi."

"Yu poured some into me when healing," Xi put in quickly, since it had to have been about Yu. Everything always was. They had to placate Weynala, and if Yu's death pleased the faery--- he could almost understand that.

Weynala closed her eyes, looking truly serene. "Celestials be praised."

The three of them remained silent: Sayewa because she was in her trance; Xi because he was bewildered, and his mother... he did not know her reasons, but he guessed that she wanted something badly enough to endure being insulted.

Tien Lyn was ready with her pitch the moment the Serene Mother opened her eyes again. Their tint was warmer now, a soft mossy colour. He would have called her gaze dreamy, if he did not taste the poison in the air.

"Sayewa's mind holds the key to saving the Empire from the Blood Horde. But it is broken. Only the Temple of Serene Joy has the power to mend it."

Xi hoped his mother was right about the temple's potency.

Weynala did not share his apprehension. "She has to be healed regardless to stand the trial before the Council."

"This is your prerogative, Serene Mother, but allow us to stay and witness the miracle of healing."

He had never seen his mother this demure. Weynala inclined her head gracefully, granting the favour, then drew Sayewa to her chest and started up a song. Her hair floated up into a great fan, the green blades of the leaves giving way to the white blossoms.

As the song poured out of the temple, it filled with the sisters and acolytes, each finding a place around Sayewa, and her voice joining the choir. Every time another one walked in, Xi thought that this was it, the perfect harmony, but each time he was mistaken.

His mother sat down cross-legged in an out of the way corner and patted the petals-covered floor. "Come here. This is going to take a while."

"I will stand," he said, watching the gathering. But as the hours went on, he gave up and leaned against the painted Emperor's ankles. He was glad that the faery old masters loved monumental frescoes, because he'd rather his head reach his distant ancestor's knees, than the parts that fathered the nation.

The faeries with the most powerful voices joined in last, making the walls quiver with echo, and the petals swirl through the air like the snowflakes in the wind. The Council members had arrived, Xi surmised.

He did not know how, but he recognized the last voice that weaved its way into the harmony: Sayewa's. Not until his mother dabbed his eyes with the inside of her sleeve, he realized that the moisture on his cheeks was from crying.