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what I wanted. You’d have a husband who’d do the same for you. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
    “No, it wouldn’t,” I replied.
    Li Po and I had talked about many things during the course of our friendship, but we’d never really talked about the future. It had simply been there,looming in the distance, as dark and threatening as a storm cloud. Had we been hoping to make it go away by ignoring it? Or had we hoped to outrun it?
    “What do you want to be?” I asked quietly, somewhat chagrined that the question had never occurred to me before now. I’d been so busy identifying the boundaries that contained me that I hadn’t taken the time to see the ones that bound Li Po.
    He gave a slightly self-conscious laugh. “I’m not sure I know. That’s the problem. And I’m not so sure it would make any difference even if I did. Boys aren’t allowed to make choices any more than girls are. I know you don’t think this is so, but it’s the truth, Mulan. If I go against the wishes of my family, if I bring them dishonor, everyone will suffer.”
    “But I thought you wanted to be a poet or a scholar,” I said. “Isn’t that what your family wants too?”
    “It is what they want,” Li Po agreed. “But how can I know if it’s what I want when I’ve never been allowed to consider any other options? Just once I’d like to be free to listen to the voice inside my own head, to discover something all on my own.
    “That’s part of why I like being with you. You may be bossy …” He slid me a quick laughing glance to take in my reaction. “But you never boss me around. So, yes, I do wonder what it would be like to be married to you, sometimes. You’d let me be myself, and I’d do the same for you.”
    “And your mother?” I asked. “How would we convince her to leave us both alone?”
    Li Po gave a sigh. “I don’t have the faintest idea,” he admitted.
    “It sounds as if we should ride off into the sunset together,” I said. “Very quietly, and on your horse.”
    “It does sound pretty silly when you put it that way, doesn’t it?” Li Po said.
    “Not silly,” I answered. “Just impossible.”
    We sat quietly. The branches of the old plum tree swayed and whispered softly, almost as if they wished to console us.
    “It’s getting late,” Li Po said finally. “I should probably be getting home. The last thing we want is for my mother to send out a search party.”
    “Shh!” I said suddenly, clamping a hand around his wrist to silence him. “Listen! I think someone’s coming.”
    Above the voice of the stream, I heard a new sound—the sound of horses. Now that I’d acknowledged it was there, I realized I’d been hearing it for quite some time. But I’d been so wrapped up in my conversation with Li Po that I hadn’t recognized all the other things my ears were trying to tell me.
    I could identify the creak of leather, the faintest jingle of harness. And most of all, I could hear the sharp sound of horses picking their way carefully over stones.
    They are coming up the streambed! I thought. And there is more than one . They were close. In another moment the horses would pass beneath the boughs of the plum tree that extended out over the water.
    “Li Po, your legs,” I whispered suddenly, for they were dangling down.
    Li Po gave a frown. His head was cocked in my direction, though his eyes stayed fixed on the scene below.
    “What?”
    “Pull up your legs,” I said, urgently now. “Whoever is coming will be able to see them. They’re longer than mine.”
    To this day I’m not quite sure how it happened. As a general rule Li Po was no more clumsy than I. Perhaps it was the fear of being caught, the astonishment that whoever was coming had chosen to ride up the streambed rather than the road. But in his haste to get his feet up out of the way, Li Po lost his balance. He reached for a branch to steady himself. Unfortunately, he found me instead.
    One moment I was sitting in the