"You could stop it, couldn't you?"

  The question arrived by the fire, in the interval between one cricket's chirp and the next. It did not come as a surprise. I had been expecting it, in the back of my mind, since the moment he'd shown me the basket full of dead herbs.

  I said nothing.

  The fire popped and I watched it for a moment. The flames were orange and yellow and blue, the colors of a fire that had been burning for a while and had settled into its fuel.

  "The thing out there." He was sitting across from me, knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. His face was orange in the firelight and dark everywhere else. "Whatever's draining the forest and scaring the animals and killing the herbs and—" He stopped. Reorganized. Started again, quieter. "You could stop it."

  The fire moved between us. Shadows shifted on the ground, lengthening and shortening in the rhythm of flames that had no idea they were illuminating anything important.

  "I've seen what you can do. One finger. One touch. The boar — a beast that could have killed me, killed everyone in the village, killed anything it wanted — and you turned it to dust before I could blink."

  A log settled. The fire rearranged itself around the collapse, redistributing heat, continuing.

  "So this thing? Whatever's out there doing this? You could stop it." He paused. "You could stop it and it wouldn't even be hard."

  The cricket resumed. Tentatively. One chirp, then silence, then another, testing whether the conversation had resolved itself.

  I stared into the fire. The flames broke complex molecules into simple ones and released the energy difference as light and heat. It was a process I understood at a level of detail that would take several lifetimes to communicate. The universe was made of things breaking down and the breaking down produced warmth and the warmth was temporary and this was called physics and no one had ever improved on it.

  I said nothing.

  Wei waited. He was better at waiting now — the training had taught him that, if nothing else. He sat in the silence like a stone in a stream, letting it flow around him instead of fighting it. His breathing was slow. His eyes were steady.

  He waited long enough that the answer became clear.

  Then he nodded. Once. Small. The nod of a boy who had asked a question not because he didn't know the answer, but because he needed the answer to exist in the space between them — acknowledged, undeniable, occupying the same air as the fire and the crickets and the dark.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He did not ask why. That restraint was either wisdom or exhaustion and I was not in a position to judge which, because I didn't have a why that I could have given him. The truth — that I could stop it, that it would cost me nothing, that the effort required would be less than the effort of breathing and that I had chosen, for thousands of years, not to — was not a truth that could be spoken aloud without crumbling under the weight of its own indefensibility.

  The fire burned. He went to sleep. I stayed awake, which was redundant, because I was always awake.

  The next morning, I went into the village.

  Not as Yun. As the herb woman. The quiet one from the forest edge, the one the fisherman distrusted and Mrs. Zhao offered tea to and the children ignored because she didn't smile enough to be interesting. I walked down the narrow path between houses, past the washing stone, past the chicken coop that Chen was rebuilding with one good leg and a vocabulary of profanity that spanned four regional dialects.

  The village elder sat outside the community hall.

  His name was Li — a thin man with eyes that had been shrewd before they'd been old and were now both. He sat on a wooden stool that was slightly too tall for the step it rested on, giving him an air of precarious authority that matched his position in the village. He was carving something — a piece of softwood, shaping it with a knife that had been sharpened so many times the blade was concave. He didn't look up when I approached, but his carving slowed, which was attention enough.

  I stopped in front of him. The morning light fell across the village square — such as it was, a patch of packed earth between the well and the hall that served as marketplace, gathering point and arena for every dispute that couldn't be resolved inside a house.

  "The harvest won't be enough," I said.

  He carved. A curl of wood fell to the ground.

  "Store grain. What you have — preserve it. The winter will be long."

  This time he looked up. His eyes were the color of tea left in the sun — amber, clear, evaluating. He didn't know me. Or rather, he knew me the way the village knew me: as a presence, a feature of the landscape, the woman who stood at the tree line and apparently had opinions about herbs.

  "How would you know that?" he asked.

  "Experience."

  A reasonable answer. Also insufficient — no amount of herbal experience explained the confidence of someone predicting a winter that was still a month away. He knew this. I knew he knew this. The space between what I said and what he understood was the width of a hand and neither of us reached across.

  He carved another curl. Considered.

  "Experience," he repeated. Testing the word, the way Wei tested mushroom names — rolling it, feeling the weight, deciding whether it was something he could use or something he should discard.

  He looked at the fields. The thin crops. The sky, which was blue and empty and helpful to no one.

  "Thank you for the advice," he said.

  I nodded. Turned. Walked back toward the tree line.

  Behind me, I heard the carving resume. But slower. The rhythm of a man thinking about grain storage and long winters and the quiet certainty in a stranger's voice that sounded less like advice and more like knowledge.

  He would listen. Not because he believed me — belief was a luxury — but because she had been calm where everyone else had been afraid. In small villages, in dangerous times, calmness was a currency more valuable than truth.

  I walked back to the forest. The herb woman. The nobody. The thing that had once stood on a hill while a city burned and was now giving grain advice to a man on a stool.

  The universe, I suspected, found this amusing.

  I was beginning to.