He left before sunrise.

  Not sneaking — Wei could move quietly when he chose to, but quietly was a relative term when the listener was me. He simply woke early, dressed and stood in the doorway.

  "I'm going to have a look."

  "I know."

  "Just look."

  I nodded and he left.

  His footsteps went barefoot on stone, then dirt, then the path east, then gone — the progressive silence of departure, distance accumulating between us. I followed him a good distance with my qi-senses, but I left him, when he left the village.

  I sat.

  I am good at waiting. Millennia of it. Patient is what I am — the long and empty kind of patience, when the outcome doesn't matter because nothing mattered. That kind of waiting is easy.

  This was not that kind. And that's what made the hours heavy.

  The house was small and quiet, containing me and the absence of him. It felt like his absence had weight that pressed against the walls.

  I made tea. Properly for once — hot water, leaves, the process that required attention and that I used as a distraction, to put my focus elsewhere, because its current target was empty — as empty as the house. I drank it hot and the novelty was startling — the warmth of the cup as a substitute for the warmth of a boy.

  Inadequate.

  I don't know how many hours had passed. Time moved at the rate that the wrong kind of waiting imposed — slow, thick and full with anxiety.

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  I did not train, repair, walk, cook, read, meditate or plan. Instead, I just sat there, feeling the emptiness again, that filled me for years, until I met a boy in the woods attacked by a spirit beast, who collected the wrong mushrooms and herbs, trying to help his dying father.

  The teacup had a hairline crack running from the rim to the midpoint. it wasn't structural or dangerous, the kind of flaw that reduced value without reducing function. I held the crack, my thumb over the line where the ceramic was compromised.

  I released the crack. The cup held.

  The sun moved from east to west. Eight hours, nine, ten.

  The garden was visible through the window — the dock grass had produced a second stalk, vertical and stiff, the lemongrass was being lemongrass and the nettle-cousin had bloomed. A small white incorrect flower that was beautiful in its own rights because it was wrong.

  The blade fragment caught the afternoon light. His things. Objects that told, that he was here, he had put them there — that this was his place.

  I waited. He would come back. Or he wouldn't. He would stay. He would walk through the gate and see things that were shiny and people who were impressed and the brightness would be irresistible.

  The crack in the cup. I put my thumb back.

  The light turned low and golden by evening, the honey-shade that preceded sunset. Then footsteps on the path, approaching — the rhythm of feet on dirt that I recognized because I recognized his, the cadence that was Wei arriving.

  He stood in the doorway, feet black with road dust. His face was neutral.

  "I'm staying."

  Two words. The two best words. I went, I saw, I chose and my choosing is here.

  I said nothing. The exhale that didn't exhale. But my shoulders dropped — the shift from coiled to settled that I hadn't authorized and that he probably noticed.

  "Why?" I asked. After he'd sat and poured tea.

  He grinned with the authentic grin of someone who had found something funny in the serious.

  "Because they were boring."

  I looked at him. He looked at me.

  The crack in the cup was still holding.

  "Boring," I repeated flatly.

  "Boring."

  Maybe the Iron Lotus training grounds were impressive but not interesting — impressive and interesting were two different things and his judgment lived in the difference?

  Maybe the people there didn't see him. They saw his qi, his potential, his metrics. They saw a resource. And he — fourteen, someone who recognized the difference between being seen and being measured — had noticed?

  Maybe back was here. Because I was here?

  He wasn't saying that and I never asked.

  The answer was the grin.

  "Have some tea," I said.

  He drank.

  The cup held.