The third floor was quiet. The others had gone to sleep, and the only light came from the thin strip of moonlight that fell through the window and across the floorboards.

  Yan Qiu sat on his bed with the letter in his hands. He turned it over once, ran his thumb across his mother’s handwriting on the front, and broke the seal.

  He unfolded it and began to read.

  Qiu,

  Your father and I read your letter together. He pretended he was not listening, but he sat by the door the whole time and did not move until I finished reading it out loud. He will not admit it, so I am telling you instead.

  We are so happy that you were accepted. Third place. Your father went outside after I read that part and stood in the yard for a long time, and when he came back in his eyes were red. I think that is the proudest I have ever seen him.

  He could picture it. His father standing in the yard with his arms at his sides, staring at nothing, trying to hold it together. His mother watching from the doorway and knowing better than to follow him out.

  It sounds like you have made good friends. Sun Hao sounds like a kind boy, and I am glad you are not alone up there. Xu Liang too, the one from the inn who talked too much and liked meat buns. I hope you will see him again someday. The seniors on your floor sound decent. Please listen to them when they give you advice. They have been there longer and they know things you do not.

  Your father’s leg is doing well. He is back in the fields and working without any trouble. My hands ache in the mornings when it gets cold, but it is nothing serious, so do not worry about us. We are both healthy.

  Yan Qiu let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. His father’s leg was fine. His mother’s hands were just the cold. They were healthy.

  I have to tell you something difficult.

  He stopped. His eyes stayed on that line for a moment before he moved to the next one.

  Blackroot was attacked. Monsters came down from the north and overran the village. It happened fast and nobody was prepared for it.

  Blackroot.

  Yan Qiu read the line again, slower, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something different if he gave them long enough. They did not.

  He kept going.

  A lot of people were injured, Qiu. Many of them badly. And a few of the villagers died.

  His hands tightened on the paper. He could see the village in his head, the low houses and the dirt paths and the fields running up to the tree line where the forest started. He could see the people who lived there, Uncle Liu and Old Grandmother Sun and the Zhao family and all the others who had come to see him off the morning he left for Dusthaven.

  ‘Which ones? Who is hurt? Who is dead?’

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  His mother did not say.

  He kept reading.

  The Wei family was hit the worst. Their mother is seriously injured and still has not recovered. Their father’s health has gotten much worse from everything that happened. They are alive, but they are not well.

  And Wang Jun is gone.

  He read that line and his eyes stayed on it. He did not move to the next one.

  Wang Jun. Village Chief Wang’s grandson. The kid who had ridden in the same carriage with him to Dusthaven, who had sat across from him on the wooden bench while the wheels rattled over the mountain roads. He had been accepted into the sect the same year Yan Qiu had failed.

  ‘He was my age.’

  The village chief’s grandson tried to keep the beasts away from his grandfather. He was injured badly in the fight and did not survive.

  Yan Qiu lowered the letter to his lap. He sat there for a while and stared at the wall across from his bed without seeing it. Wang Jun was not a fighter. He was a merchant’s kid who had gotten lucky with spiritual roots. He had no business standing between beasts and an old man, and he had done it anyway, and it had killed him.

  He picked the letter back up.

  After everything that happened, most of the survivors packed up and left. Your father and I went to his family’s village. Blackroot is almost deserted now, Qiu. There is hardly anyone left.

  They left.

  He tried to picture it. The houses standing empty with their doors open and nobody inside. The fields going to weeds. The paths where he had walked as a child with no footprints on them anymore. His parents packing up what they could carry and walking to his father’s family village because there was nothing left for them in Blackroot.

  Blackroot is gone.

  Not burned down or destroyed. Just emptied out. The people scattered and the village left behind like something nobody wanted anymore.

  I am sorry to write this in a letter. I did not want to upset you, but I did not want you to find out some other way. Please do not be too sad. Your father and I are safe and we are fine where we are. There was nothing anyone could have done.

  There was nothing anyone could have done.

  She always said that. When they were ten coins short and the rice was running low, when his father’s leg was shattered and the doctor shook his head, when the neighbors whispered about the Yan family and their bad luck. There was nothing anyone could have done. It was her way of telling him to stop carrying things he could not change.

  Have you met the Wei family’s daughter at the sect? She is still there, as far as we know. If you see her, please let her know about her parents. She should hear it from someone she knows.

  The Wei family’s daughter. The girl who had stitched him a pair of tiny crooked shoes when he was born, who had gone to the Barched Wind Sect when she was ten. She was somewhere in this sect right now and she did not know that her mother was badly hurt and her father was getting worse.

  ‘I do not even know what she looks like.’

  The weather has been cold this year. Your father has been helping his brother with the fields here, and we have enough grain stored to last the winter. We are managing.

  Eat well, train hard and do not skip meals.

  We miss you.

  Your mother

  Yan Qiu sat with the letter in his lap for a long time after he finished reading. He thought about his parents walking through the village after the attack, seeing the damage and the empty houses and the people who were left, and then packing up and leaving the only home they had built for themselves. And then sitting down and writing him a letter that started with how proud they were of him.

  He thought about Village Chief Wang, the old man who had given him the cultivation book and told him his son and grandson had no interest in cultivation. He thought about the grandson who had tried to protect him from the beasts and died for it.

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  He did not know. His mother had not mentioned the chief. She had mentioned Wang Jun’s death but said nothing about the old man himself, and that silence sat heavy in Yan Qiu’s chest.

  ‘And I am here. Training. Eating. Sleeping in a bed.’

  He folded the letter carefully and put it back in his wooden chest and closed the lid. He lay down and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

  The moonlight moved slowly across the floor. Somewhere on the third floor, Peng Hu was snoring.

  Yan Qiu stared at the ceiling and did not sleep for a long time.

  He still had to meet the elder tommorrow.