Two days passed. Wei didn't mention the Iron Lotus, didn't mention Fang Liang. He trained, cooked, went to Lao Chen's and came back with metal dust in his hair and questions about tempering techniques that I answered with the minimum required.

  On the third day, he returned to the topic.

  He came in from this morning's training and stood in the kitchen — the posture of someone assembling a speech, visible in the set of his shoulders and his hands hanging useless at his sides.

  "I've been thinking about it."

  I knew what it was. It was the only it in the room.

  "About the sect."

  I put down my tea. Not because I needed to — but putting it down was giving him my attention. He seldom asked, so it deserved the cup on the table.

  "I want to know what you think," he said.

  The same request as two days ago. Re-presented. Because the first response — the seventh-form correction, the deflection — had been obvious as a deflection. He was fourteen. Old enough to hear such and young enough to insist on trying again.

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  I looked at him in the morning light.

  "If you want to go," I said, "I won't stop you."

  A few words containing enough emotional material to sustain a lesser being for weeks, delivered with the flatness that was my register and that was necessary because the alternative was the tremor.

  He looked at me.

  "That's not advice."

  "No."

  "What is it?"

  I paused. A genuine pause. Someone searching for the honest answer and discovering the honest answer had contradictory layers.

  "Respect."

  He blinked.

  "Respect?"

  "For your judgment. You're fourteen. You've survived more than most adults. You're capable of making this decision."

  He studied me. Parsing the response for subtext and finding more of it than he'd expected.

  "You don't want me to go."

  A statement, not a question.

  I said nothing.

  "But you're not going to say that," he continued.

  "No."

  "Because it would be — what? An attempt to control me?"

  He understood. Better than I'd expected. She won't tell me what to do because telling me what to do is the thing she's most afraid of.

  Not the most, I'm afraid of. My biggest fear, was for him to die. But the second one was him living as someone whose life was my construction.

  "It would be unfair," I said.

  "To whom?"

  "To you."

  He stood there in the kitchen, in the morning light, with the gouge in the table and the chrysanthemum still in its paper bag, still unused.

  He went outside, back to training.

  I sat in the kitchen with my cold tea.

  I drank it anyway.