Threads

The first time Sairen touched her, it was incidental.

Her hand brushed Yunhua's sleeve as they stood in the greenhouse. The sleeves of Sairen's robe, sheer and gossamer-thin, barely grazed Yunhua's wool-bound wrist. But the contact was unmistakable, intentional in the way only high-born people could manage: light enough to be deniable, pointed enough to mean something.

Yunhua didn't move.

The lotus they had been studying had gone forgotten, its curled pink tips barely visible beneath a film of lime mold. The warmth of Sairen's fingers lingered longer than it should have in her thoughts.

—

It became harder to hide.

Not just from the whispers, but from herself.

They walked often now—quiet paths around the outer gardens, across the moss-veined stones near the observation wells, even once beneath the eaves of the old bathhouse ruins. Always publicly. Always where eyes might notice.

And they did.

Not just apprentices. Masters. Attendants. Stewards. Even the visiting dignitaries sometimes turned to glance as the two passed—one tall and gilded in silk, the other quiet and drab, like a raven keeping pace with a heron.

Sairen never seemed to mind. Or rather, she never seemed aware of being watched.

But Yunhua suspected otherwise.

No one carried themselves with that much precision without knowing the weight of it.

—

"I wonder," Sairen said once, as they walked by a long stretch of peach trees whose buds had yet to bloom, "what it was like for you growing up here."

Yunhua didn't answer immediately.

There were too many versions of that truth. The one she lived. The one others assumed. The one she never let herself examine closely.

"It was quiet," she finally said. "I kept to myself."

Sairen gave a soft hum, not quite approval, not quite sympathy. "You weren't born here, though. I can tell."

Yunhua's eyes flicked up. "You make a lot of assumptions."

"I make educated guesses," Sairen corrected, not unkindly. "And you confirm them."

There was a beat of silence. Yunhua didn't rise to the bait.

Sairen tilted her head, regarding her more directly now. "You speak like someone who learned caution early. That, too, tells me something."

Yunhua looked away. "Why are you so interested?"

Sairen's steps slowed. "You're the only one here who doesn't preen or shrink in front of me. It's a rare trait, either way."

Yunhua blinked, unsure whether that was meant as flattery or warning.

"Besides," Sairen added lightly, "it's been a long time since I saw someone who reminded me of home."

That stopped her.

Home?

"Wasn't expecting that," Yunhua muttered.

Sairen's smile was faint. "Most aren't."

—

The next time, Yunhua did not dress plainly.

She didn't mean to choose the embroidered sleeves. Or the ribbon with the softened plum thread. Or to spend so long fussing with her mother's hair pin in her hair that she was nearly late.

But she did.

And when Sairen saw her, something unreadable crossed the lady's face—just for a moment, like sunlight cutting through overcast sky.

"A good color for you," she said. "It makes the markings on your brow more distinct."

Yunhua flushed, though she turned her face aside. "They're nothing."

"They're not," Sairen said, a rare firmness to her tone. "They're heritage. You should not let this place make you forget that."

It stung more than Yunhua expected.

Because she had let it. Forgotten—or hidden—her mother's language, her father's name, the songs she once knew by heart and now couldn't hum past the first bar.

In this place, she had tried so hard to disappear that sometimes even she didn't remember what she'd looked like before.

She didn't know if Sairen saw that flicker of guilt. But the lady's voice gentled again, fingers brushing an early-blossomed bud as they passed. "Tell me what you remember."

"What?"

"From your childhood," Sairen said. "Your mother's garden. Your people's customs. Anything."

Yunhua hesitated.

"I remember," she said finally, "that she boiled dried plum skins to dye fabric. Our courtyard fence was always stained at the bottom. Red like rust."

Sairen smiled. "Practical beauty. I admire that."

—

A week passed. Then two.

By now, Yunhua no longer pretended she was simply called upon.

She met Sairen as though it were scheduled. Not official, but expected. Not frequent, but inevitable.

Each encounter bled a little more familiarity into the air between them. Not warmth exactly—Sairen was not warm—but understanding. Recognition.

The unspoken truth between them now hummed, quiet and constant: like calls to like.

They were not equals. Not in rank, not in presence.

But there was something in the shape of their aloneness that mirrored. Yunhua was starting to feel it.

So when Sairen summoned her to the eastern chamber gardens—a private alcove where nobles usually dined in seclusion—Yunhua did not ask what for.

She simply went.

—

There was no retinue this time.

Only a pot of tea, already steeping on a lacquered table beneath a cherry tree in late bloom. The pink-white petals fluttered lazily down over the stone path, collecting in shallow bowls and the creases of robes.

Yunhua stood at the edge of the space, unsure.

"You came," Sairen said, not rising. "Good."

Yunhua hesitated. "Am I... permitted to sit?"

Sairen gestured to the cushion across from her. "It's only tea. You'll survive the scandal."

Yunhua sat.

The tea was pale, fragrant with something floral and faintly tart—crabapple blossom, she guessed. It reminded her of early spring by the Lower Passes, where her mother once gathered wild herbs among the rocks.

Sairen poured for both of them.

For a while, they drank in silence.

Then Sairen spoke. "You've heard the rumors, I assume."

Yunhua raised a brow. "Which ones?"

"That I'm making you a pet project. Grooming you. Or worse, amusing myself with a charity case."

Yunhua did not deny it.

Sairen smiled faintly. "Well, I won't insult you by pretending your sudden visibility wasn't intentional. But amusement?" She shook her head. "I don't invest in things that bore me."

"And what am I to you?" Yunhua asked, before she could stop herself.

Sairen's eyes narrowed—not in annoyance, but like someone choosing their words with care.

"You are a thread," she said slowly. "One that someone here has tried to snip early. But I can see its origin. I know the cloth it belongs to."

Yunhua didn't understand. "What cloth?"

"The East," Sairen said simply. "The border clans. The forgotten dialects. The shared blood no one here wants to acknowledge. You are one of the last strands from a tapestry they've tried to erase."

Yunhua stared.

"I knew your mother's people," Sairen went on, voice softer. "Long ago. Before the treaties. Before the Garrison outposts bled into the northern ridges. I recognized your eyes the moment I saw you. Not just in shape—but in what they carried."

"What do they carry?" Yunhua asked, her voice smaller than she intended.

Sairen met her gaze. "Memory. The kind that survives even when you try to abandon it."

—

Yunhua walked back that night in a daze.

She had heard stories of emissaries from the East who tried to keep the old ways alive—who argued against forced integration, who helped preserve tribal records, who quietly protected villages deemed "nonessential" by Western expansion.

She had never known any of them.

But now one had spoken to her like she was part of that same world. A relic not worth discarding. A living root from the same tree.

And for the first time in years, Yunhua dreamed in her mother's language.

—

The next day, Yunhua passed Rowan in the corridor.

They didn't speak. Rowan's eyes flicked toward her—then away again, fast.

But Yunhua noticed something she hadn't before: a pause in Rowan's stride. A flicker of something unreadable in her face. Regret? Doubt?

Yunhua didn't call out.

She wasn't sure she wanted to reopen that wound. Not when she was just beginning to look at herself with different eyes.

—

The following week, Sairen's official business began in earnest.

Yunhua saw less of her. The tea walks stopped. The casual brushes of contact, the long gazes—they became fewer, briefer, stolen between corridors.

But when they met again—in the shadowed rear of the inner library, where herbal texts had been shifted for an inventory review—Sairen's eyes were sharper than ever.

She stepped close. Not quite breaching decorum. But close enough that Yunhua's skin tensed.

"I'm leaving soon," she said.

Yunhua nodded, her mouth dry.

"But before I do," Sairen added, fingers grazing the spine of an old treatise, "I want you to know: there are people beyond this place who would not just accept you—but value you."

Yunhua's throat tightened.

"I have arrangements," Sairen said. "If you ever wish to leave this outpost, to pursue the work your bloodline makes you suited for, you need only send word."

"Why me?" Yunhua asked, barely a whisper.

Sairen's gaze softened. "Because when I was your age, someone did the same for me."

She stepped back then. As if nothing had been said.

And Yunhua, alone again, sat by the window and held that quiet promise in her hands like something dangerous.

Like something sacred.