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rest!”
    Skybright smiled weakly at that. Zhen Ni was used to getting her way. She leaned back and closed her eyes while her mistress sat beside her.
    “You like Lan,” Skybright said after a while.
    There was such a long pause, she opened her eyes, wondering if Zhen Ni had not heard her. Her mistress was studying her with an unreadable expression, and Skybright had always been able to read her mistress as easily as a deck of cards. “She makes a good friend. I enjoy her company.” Zhen Ni arched her graceful neck and examined a lotus painting, avoiding eye contact in that way she did when she was being evasive. “Don’t you like her?”
    “She’s nice,” Skybright said. But in truth, Skybright wasn’t used to sharing Zhen Ni’s attentions, not used to seeing her laugh and chatter so easily with another girl their age. They sat without looking at each other, and listened to the soft trickle of the waterfall from the courtyard. “I can never be a true friend to you,” Skybright whispered after a long silence. “I can only ever be your handmaid.”
    “Sky!” Zhen Ni grabbed her hand. “You’re my sister, my better and kinder half.” She gripped her fingers. “How can you say such a thing? You’re delirious!”
    Lady Yuan swished in with a bustle of flowing silk panels on her beautiful dress, followed by Nanny Bai and Lan. “Skybright! You’ve sent the household in an uproar. We’ve had servants scouring the entire village and had others going into town to search for you, twice.”
    “Three times,” Zhen Ni said.
    “I’m sorry, Lady Yuan. I must have wandered off in my sleep.” Skybright stared at the silk sheet embroidered with chrysanthemums.
    Lady Yuan stood beside the bed and touched the back of her hand to Skybright’s brow. “Zhen Ni said you weren’t feeling well?”
    “I think … I’m just overtired, Lady.”
    “It isn’t—?”
    “No, Lady. It isn’t that.” Skybright had a feeling that her monthly letting would never come.
    Lady Yuan nodded and smoothed the stray strands of hair from Skybright’s brow. It was such an intimate, maternal gesture, one that they had never shared before, that Skybright almost cringed. Lady Yuan clapped her hands. “Come girls, let’s leave Skybright with Nanny Bai.”
    Zhen Ni gave her a hug before following her mother and Lan out into the courtyard.
    Skybright breathed a sigh of relief and sank into the cushions.
    “What happened, child?” Nanny Bai asked. What had once been a husky voice was now coarse with age. The same voice that used to sing her to sleep on rare occasions. Nanny Bai was the closest thing she ever had to a mother.
    “It’s as I said. I think I wandered off in my sleep.”
    The older woman felt the pulse at her wrist and her throat, leaned closer to listen to her breathing. “You never sleep walked as a child. It’s … unusual to start so late in age.”
    “Am I that old?” Skybright asked without thinking.
    Nanny Bai laughed, the sound like the wind stirring brittle leaves. “Where did you go?”
    “Into the forest.”
    The older woman made a strange noise in her throat, catching Skybright’s attention. The lines around her old nursemaid’s eyes and along her mouth had deepened in these passing years, but her brown eyes were still as sharp as ever. She smelled of pungent herbs, as she always did—a rich, earthy bitterness.
    “What is it?” Skybright whispered.
    “I’ve never told anyone this, because it was your story.” Nanny Bai glanced down at her strong, able hands, though the knuckles were beginning to thicken with age. “I was the one to find you, yes. But it wasn’t at our front doorstep.”
    Skybright pushed herself up. “What do you mean?”
    “I found you abandoned in the forest, child.”
    She shook her head in disbelief, and her old nursemaid clucked her tongue in sympathy. “It was the beginning of summer, and the weather was fine that day. I decided to go into town to pick up some medicinal