“Almost Brilliant? Would you go scout for us? Fly over quickly and see if there’s anyone who might need our help or anything we could do?”

Almost Brilliant chirped an assent before she took wing, and Chih took a deep breath to calm their nerves. The shouting and the clash of arms made them shake, and the instinct to run away was very strong.

“Is she going to be all right?” asked Sang, and Chih nodded.

“No one stops to kill a little bird during a battle,” they said, reminding themself as well. “We have some records, old ones, about how the first neixin were condors and eagles. I’ve been very glad many times that Almost Brilliant is as small as she is.”

Sang nodded distractedly, but her eyes were fixed on what they could see in the village, which wasn’t much. Whether the attackers were actually members of the Hollow Hand or simply crude imitators as Lao Bingyi insisted they were, they were dangerous, and they were deadly. Chih’s hands shook, and they clasped them together, centering the way they had been taught, grounding themself so that when the time came to act, they could do so.

Are you seeing, really seeing? Cleric Hahn said in their memory. Will you remember?

Wei Jintai suddenly appeared on a roof, not as if she had climbed but as if she had leaped. Two figures in black followed her, circling her like dogs would a bear. She was shorter than both of them, and they bore poleaxes, longer by far than her sword.

Wei Jintai gave no indication that she was meant to be at a disadvantage. Instead she spun in a tight circle to dodge the first lunge and twisted behind her attacker. A flash of her sword, and she skewered them both chest to chest. Chih thought with frozen horror of how much force it took to send a sword straight through two bodies and then to jerk it free again with nothing more than a flick of her wrist.

Another leap put Wei Jintai back in the war again, and slowly, the two bodies she left behind slipped off the roof.

I’ll remember that I was terrified, Chih thought. I’ll remember what it was like to see a battle between people who don’t fight like people, who are what legends come from.

“She’s so strong and wild her master sent her away,” Sang said, something numb in her voice. “She would never be content to do good in the civilized world. She would never fit there, not with the stories they were beginning to tell about her. They were saying such … She needed to come out here, to be with people more like her.”

The clash of swords, the howls of the dying.

“She belongs here,” Sang said, and Chih looked at her.

“And you?”

Before Sang could answer, Almost Brilliant returned, landing on Chih’s bare head.