Steam and Silk

Yan Mei led Xuan Wei to the finest guest chamber in the western wing.

She had overseen its preparation herself that morning, and it was beautiful: a sitting room hung with silk paintings of cranes over misty peaks; a bedchamber with a wide, low bed heaped with embroidered cushions; and beyond a moon-shaped doorway, a private bath—a sunken pool of smooth black stone fed by the warm spring that welled up beneath the hill.

Steam curled lazily off its surface and drifted out into the bedchamber, carrying the faint mineral tang of the spring and the sweet jasmine oil the maids had floated on the water. Late sunlight came through the paper windows and turned the steam to gold.

"Please rest here until the banquet, Sister Xuan," Yan Mei said, and bowed. "Prepare as you like. The maids will bring anything you need, and I'll keep you company until it's time."

Xuan Wei looked around the rooms with idle approval. Then she looked at Yan Mei—longer. Warm and assessing and not entirely sisterly. Those long, kohl-lined eyes traveled from the jade pins in Yan Mei's braids down over the green silk, lingered on the deep V of her neckline, slid over the swell of her hips and the flash of thigh at the slit, and came back up slowly.

Yan Mei felt that look like a hand.

"Yan Tian is quite lucky," Xuan Wei said, "to have such a beautiful, clever wife. I'm looking forward to knowing you much, much better."

She smiled when she said it. The smile reached her eyes and kept going—somewhere Yan Mei couldn't follow.

They talked. At first it was the stiff, careful talk of strangers of unequal rank, but Xuan Wei had no patience for stiffness and tore it apart with alarming speed. She asked about Jinling City and laughed at the answers.

She told filthy stories about the wives of other inner elders—which ones took their husbands' disciples to bed, which ones had been caught in the bathhouses on their knees, which ones had poisoned a rival over a hairpin.

She was frank, funny in a sharp, cruel way, and utterly without shame. Within half an hour Yan Mei was laughing behind her sleeve at things she would never, ever have said out loud.

"Come." Xuan Wei rose and stretched her arms above her head, and her bare breasts lifted and swayed beneath their two red strips. "The water's going to waste. Bathe with me."

It wasn't really a request.

Yan Mei had expected it. She called the maids to help with her pins and laces, and the green silk slid from her shoulders and pooled around her feet.

Xuan Wei didn't need a maid. She unclasped the gold collar at her throat and the red strips fell away from her breasts. She unhooked the golden waistband and let it drop with its two panels.

Chiiing.

The linked plates chimed against the floor. There had been nothing underneath. She stood naked in the steam with no more concern than if she'd kicked off her slippers—and watched, openly, hungrily, as the maids unwrapped Yan Mei.

Under the green silk, Yan Mei wore a thin breastband of white silk and a narrow loincloth to match, tied at the hips with fine strings. The maids untied them and drew them away.

Her breasts spilled free.

Heavy. Full. Bigger than Xuan Wei's. The skin very white, faintly veined with blue along the sides, the nipples a dusky pink that puckered and tightened at once in the cooler air. Her belly curved gently below the navel—a mother's belly. Her hips flared wide and lush.

The loincloth came away and bared a neatly trimmed triangle of dark hair above full, plump pussy lips. And when she turned to step down into the pool, her ass shifted—two big, round, heavy cheeks, soft as risen dough, jiggling with the movement, a faint dimple at the base of her spine.

"Oh," Xuan Wei breathed. "Oh, Yan Tian, you lucky dog."

Yan Mei flushed to her collarbones and stepped down into the water.

It was hot—almost too hot—and it closed around her calves, her thighs, her hips, and she sank until it lapped at the heavy undersides of her breasts.

Haaah.

The breath left her in a long, shuddering sigh she hadn't known she'd been holding. Heat soaked into every knotted muscle. Steam beaded on her face. Across the pool, Xuan Wei slid in after her and settled on the stone ledge opposite with her arms spread along the rim, perfectly at ease.

Her breasts floated, buoyed up by the water—round and pale, the nipples pink and glistening just above the surface. Droplets rolled down their slopes and dripped back into the pool, and the jasmine oil floating on the surface broke into faint rainbow sheens around them.

They talked as if it were an ordinary afternoon. Xuan Wei asked about Yan Chi, the crippled son who was suddenly cultivating, and Yan Mei answered carefully. Then Xuan Wei asked about Yan Tian—how he was in bed—and Yan Mei nearly choked on the steam, and Xuan Wei laughed so hard the water sloshed.

Splsh.

"Don't be such a little maiden," Xuan Wei purred. "You're thirty-eight, you have a grown son, and you have the body of a goddess of the inner chambers. I'm only curious. Xuan Wu was the most famous lecher in three provinces before he married me. He still is. I don't mind. I enjoy it." She tipped her head back against the rim and closed her eyes. "There's nothing in this world as boring as a woman ashamed of what she has."

Yan Mei didn't answer.

She found herself almost relaxing, despite everything. The heat was so good. The jasmine was sweet. Xuan Wei's frankness was dangerous, but it was strangely restful too—like a window thrown open in a stuffy room. She let her head rest against the warm stone and watched the gold steam drift through the slanting light.

She didn't notice Xuan Wei move until the other woman was right beside her.

"Turn around," Xuan Wei said. "Let me wash your back. Sisters do that."

Yan Mei hesitated. Then she turned.

Xuan Wei's hands settled on her shoulders—warm, slick with jasmine oil from a little dish on the rim—and began to knead. They were skilled hands. A dual cultivator's hands. They found every knot along her neck and shoulders and dug in with a slow, firm pressure that made Yan Mei's eyes slide shut against her will. And a thread of Qi came with them.

Very faint. Very warm.

A tingling, honeyed current that sank through her skin and into her meridians and began, slowly, to spread.

Yan Mei felt it the way one feels a sip of strong wine—a bloom of heat in the chest. Then lower. Then lower still. It moved through her like it knew the way, and everywhere it touched, it found the knot of tension she'd been carrying since the courtyard—the old elder's eyes on her ass, Yan Tian's silence, the weight of the whole house watching—and it loosened that knot. Melted it. And what poured out of the melted knot wasn't calm. It was heat.

What—what is she doing to me?

The hands slid down her spine. Out over her shoulder blades. Down to her waist. They lingered at her sides, thumbs stroking slowly along her ribs. Then the fingertips drifted forward—just a little—and brushed the outer curves of her breasts where they swelled out beneath her arms.

Yan Mei's breath caught in her throat.

Hk.

"So soft," Xuan Wei murmured against her ear, breath hot and wet. "You've hidden these under silk for how many years? It's a crime." Her hands slid further forward, cupping the sides of Yan Mei's breasts, lifting them gently from beneath as if weighing fruit at a market. Her thumbs dragged once—slowly—across the heavy undersides.

The thread of Qi pulsed.

Heat exploded in Yan Mei's chest and slid straight down through her belly like a hot coal dropped into water. Her nipples went painfully, obscenely tight. And between her legs, beneath the surface of the pool, her pussy clenched—a single hard, hungry spasm on nothing at all.

No. No, no, no—

"Sister Xuan," she said, and her voice came out low and thick. Wrong.

"Mm."

The hands drew back, unhurried, and gave her shoulders a last friendly squeeze. "There. Your shoulders were made of stone. Now you're a woman again." Xuan Wei waded back to her ledge and smiled across the water as if nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing had. Yan Mei sat with her heart pounding and her arms crossed over her aching breasts beneath the water, the heat still coiling low in her belly like something alive, and could not decide.

Xuan Wei climbed out first. She made no effort to cover herself. She stood dripping on the black stone with water streaming down between her breasts, over her belly, down the insides of her smooth thighs, and stretched like a cat and called for towels. The maids came running and dried her while she stood with her arms spread wide. Then came the dressing.

Xuan Wei put on an outfit similar to the one she'd arrived in. Only more extreme.

A maid brought it from her travel chest, folded in a lacquered box, and she lifted it out piece by piece and held each one up to the light with the satisfied air of a woman choosing weapons.

The top was the same: a gold collar at the throat, two thin strips of red silk falling from it across her breasts, so narrow they covered her nipples and nothing else. She drew them snug, so her nipples pushed out through them in two hard, shameless points, and a fine gold chain ran from the collar down between her breasts to her waist, holding everything taut.

The golden waistband this time was thinner, and she fastened it lower—so low it rested almost on her crotch, perched on the very tops of her hips. The front panel hung from it, red and short, but the band sat so low that the upper edge of her pussy showed above the cloth: the smooth, shaved mound, the first shallow beginning of the cleft.

From behind, the band sat below the top of her ass, and her crack showed for several inches above the rear panel—a deep, shadowed line between two round, oiled cheeks.

For underwear, she wore almost nothing. A thin gold chain ran from the front of the waistband down between her legs and back up between her cheeks to the rear, and at the front, where it passed over her pussy, it held a single scrap of red cloth no bigger than a plum leaf. It covered only the center of her slit. Everything else was bare. When she walked, the chain slid and settled into her, and she sighed with open pleasure at the feel of it.

She turned in front of the bronze mirror.

She looked obscenely beautiful. She looked like a statement—and the statement was that she could wear anything, anywhere, and nobody in this branch family could do a single thing about it.

Then she turned and saw Yan Mei.