Lin Qingwan still remembered how the cold had pierced to the bone that night.
Han Wuyou's bloodied blade dripped as she smiled and said she would brew a pot of rootless water, using the unmelted snow among the rebel corpses.
"A crane should be soaring over ten thousand mountains. Why be trapped in this man-eating mire?" She tore off a strip of her bloodstained clothes to wrap the wounds from the shackles around Lin Qingwan's wrist. Her fingertips were colder than the north wind.
But in the end, they were both prisoners of the wasteland.
One bore the burden of being the former dynasty Grand Tutor's legitimate daughter, her integrity as straight as bamboo, yet caught in a plot to assassinate the emperor. The other wore the tattoo of the Western Frontier's shaman clan, galloping on horseback and laughing as she drank poisoned wine, insisting that even this poison was not as bitter as the human heart.
Some wanted to make them kneel as monuments in the history books. Others sought to drive them mad and forge them into blades for a chaotic age.
Only they remembered each other:
The hairpin hidden in Lin Qingwan's hair held no poisoned needle. It held a withered twig shaped like a crane's neck, one she'd folded for Han Wuyou as a child. The brocade pouch at Han Wuyou's waist held no military seal, only a strand of the other's black hair, severed in the imperial prison.
Later, the flames of war brought down the sky above the imperial city, and they ran toward the cliff through a rain of arrows.
Han Wuyou suddenly pinned the bloodstained crane-feather hairpin into Lin Qingwan's hair. "I heard there's an immortal mountain in the far north, where flocks of cranes that never return south are buried."
Lin Qingwan looked instead at the end of an old red cord peeking from her sleeve. "If we can't make it through this hundred-mile road to the Yellow Springs..."
Where the setting sun burned red as blood, the sound of two cranes beating their wings shattered the dusk.
It turned out the wasteland never buried one's convictions. It only tempered the solitary courage to live in the face of death.
