Her name was Chen Yumei, and she had married a herbalist in a border village at twenty-two because she loved him and because she had always been practical about the relationship between love and logistics.
Chen Yi had compiled her personality profile over ten years with the same systematic attention he gave to everything, and it read: observant, patient, deliberately opaque, sense of humor that operated mostly through understatement, deep warmth expressed through acts rather than words, and an intelligence that she had apparently decided early in life not to perform for anyone.
She knew more than she said.
About most things. About everything, possibly.
She knew about the cave. Chen Yi had concluded this at around the same time his father had told him about following himself up the hill. She had never mentioned it, which was not the same as not knowing.
She knew about Elder Sun. She had started sending Chen Yi over there with small offerings — a bundle of dried herbs, a jar of the good honey from the Widow Meng's bees — at a frequency that was slightly too regular to be casual, which was his mother's way of endorsing a relationship without discussing it.
She had almost certainly noticed the changes in his cultivation. She had the same quality of attention his father had, differently expressed. His father watched what you did. His mother watched what you chose not to do.
The morning she noticed the beginning of the first white hair at his temple — weeks before it became visible enough for anyone else to see — she was sorting herbs and he was eating breakfast and she looked up from the sorting and her eyes went to his left temple and stayed there for three seconds before going back to the herbs.
She didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything.
She reached over, without looking up from the herbs, and touched the side of his head — just briefly, the back of three fingers along his temple, light as a question.
He let her.
She went back to sorting.
He ate his breakfast.
The morning went on.
Later he would understand that this was the moment his mother decided something — not to support him, she had already decided that, but to let him go. The specific decision of a woman who understood the difference between holding on and holding together, and had chosen the second, and was going to keep choosing it every morning over the herbs, the way his father kept choosing it over the mortar.
He understood it much later.
In the moment he just ate his breakfast and felt her fingers' brief warmth on his temple and was, for no reason he could calculate, less alone.