I knew the village the way a cartographer knows a coastline — from the outside, with precision and without getting wet.

  It sat at the forest's edge like a barnacle on a rock: small, tenacious, attached to nothing especially. Twenty-three structures, if you counted generously. Fourteen if your definition of "structure" required a roof that didn't leak. The fields to the west produced a harvest that could generously be called meager and honestly be called insufficient. The well at the center was deep enough for the dry months and exactly deep enough for nothing else. One road led out — south, toward the market town, an hour by cart, two by foot and a journey that most villagers made only when they had something to sell and nothing left to eat.

  I catalogued these details not from curiosity but from the same reflex that catalogued the mineral content of soil, the migration patterns of local fauna and the way the wind shifted before a three-day rain. Information accumulated around me the way sediment accumulated at a river bend: without effort, without purpose, without end.

  The fisherman — his name was Gao, though I'd learned this against my will — watched me from his doorway whenever I stood near the tree line. His look carried the weight of a man who had decided I was a problem and was waiting for evidence to confirm it.

  He crossed his yard this time. Stood at the boundary, arms folded, the posture of someone guarding a thing he couldn't name.

  "You're here again," he said.

  "I'm standing near trees. Trees are public."

  "You watch the houses."

  "I watch everything. The houses happen to be there."

  He held the stare for three breaths. Then turned back to his doorway. He was not wrong to be suspicious. He was simply suspicious of the wrong things. He worried that I might be a bandit, or a sect recruiter, or a woman with debts running from a husband. The truth would not have occurred to him. The truth rarely occurred to anyone.

  I stood at the edge. Not hiding — I had stopped bothering with concealment several dynasties ago. I simply existed at the boundary, the way the forest did and the village had not yet decided what to do about it.

  The old woman three houses from the east — Mrs. Zhao, who walked with her hips leading and her shoulders following, as if the two halves of her body belonged to different decades — had offered me tea on four separate occasions. I had declined on three. The fourth time, she set the cup on the stump near the tree line and turned to leave.

  "You'll catch cold standing out here," she said, not turning around.

  "I don't catch cold."

  "Everyone catches cold." She was already walking away. "Drink the tea."

  The cup was ceramic, chipped at the rim, filled with tea that smelled of chrysanthemum and barley. Common. Warm.

  I drank it when no one was looking.

  I watched Wei's house.

  It was easy to watch because it demanded watching — a wound you can't look away from, because looking away requires more effort than looking does. The house leaned — and not metaphorically. The eastern wall had settled unevenly, sinking several centimeters deeper into the soft ground on one side, giving the entire structure the appearance of a man mid-stumble. The thatch needed replacing; the oldest patches had gone grey-green with mold and I could see daylight through gaps where the rain would come through.

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  Wei's mother was at the washing stone. Her hands moved with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had washed clothes so many times that consciousness was no longer required for the task. Her fingers were split at the knuckles — cracked skin, raw from lye and cold water and the basic mathematics of poverty, which always balanced its equations on the backs of hands. She did not speak to the women washing nearby. They did not speak to her. They had a shared understanding that conversation required energy and energy was a currency they couldn't afford to spend on anything that didn't keep a family fed.

  Near the house, a figure too tall to be Wei and too thin to be healthy was splitting kindling. Wei's older brother, I assumed, from the shared architecture of their faces. He was perhaps twenty-five, with arms that had more tendon than muscle and a technique with the axe that compensated for strength with stubbornness. Each swing was slightly wrong — the angle too steep, the follow-through too short — but the wood split anyway, because the wood was soft from rot and the man was harder than he looked.

  On the roof, another sibling. A young woman, closer to the brother's age than to Wei's. She was pulling away the worst of the thatch, the sections that had turned to mulch and replacing them with river grass that was fresh but too thin. The repair would hold through autumn. It would not hold through winter. She'd have to do this gain, when there is snow and ice to contend with and the river grass would be frozen and brittle and impossible to work with. But it was all they had and she was doing her best.

  "Hand me the long ones," she called down.

  "These?" Wei held up a bundle of river grass.

  "The long ones, Wei. Those are short."

  "They're the same."

  "They are not the same." She leaned over the edge, pointed. "Those. There."

  Wei picked up the correct bundle with the expression of someone who had known which ones she meant all along and had chosen rebellion over efficiency.

  His father coughed.

  It had worsened. Even from the tree line, even without extending my senses beyond what a mortal woman might hear, the sound was unmistakable. Wet. Deep. The kind of cough that comes from lungs that have started to confuse each other's tasks — producing fluid where they should be circulating air, drowning in the slow, internal tide that no herb from a forest floor was going to reverse.

  Wei came out of the house with a bowl. He carried it carefully, both hands wrapped around the clay, steam rising between his fingers. The walk from the door to where his father sat — wrapped in a blanket at the side of the house, in the strip of sunlight that lasted from mid-morning to noon — took seven steps. Wei counted each one. I knew because his lips moved.

  The father took the bowl. Smiled. The smile was the product of effort — a thing assembled for his son's benefit, fitted over the landscape of pain like a tarp over a broken window. He drank. The liquid was cloudy. The herbs were wrong.

  "Good," the father said. His voice had the quality of paper held near a flame — thin, curling, on the verge of something irreversible. "Better than yesterday."

  It was not better than yesterday. It was the same as yesterday and yesterday had been the same as the day before and the entire sequence of days was a line that pointed in one direction and did not curve.

  Wei smiled back. His smile was a mirror of his father's — constructed, maintained, held in place by the same materials: love and denial and the stubborn human talent for believing in roads that had already ended.

  Blood on the father's lip. He wiped it with the back of his hand. Quick. He thought Wei didn't see.

  Wei saw.

  He walked to the tree line. Not toward me — toward the general direction of me. The physics of someone drawn to water who won't admit to thirst. He stopped three paces away, facing the forest.

  "His cough is better," Wei said.

  I said nothing.

  "It is," he said. Quieter. As if repetition could make it true.

  "The herbs need to steep longer," I said. It was the most useless advice I had ever given and I had given advice to emperors. "And the water should be hotter."

  He nodded. Turned back. His shoulders carried the weight of something he was too young to name and too stubborn to set down.

  I turned away from the village. The morning light was wrong — too bright, too warm, too generous for a place where things were this small and this broken. I walked into the forest, where the light behaved itself, filtering through leaves until it arrived softened and directionless and indifferent to what it illuminated.

  The herbs would help. For a while.