Race Across the Lake

Then the trees opened, and a lake lay in front of them.

It was not large — perhaps half a li across — but it was beautiful. The water was so clear that near the shore they could see every pebble on the bottom and the silver flicker of small fish.

Further out it deepened to green and then to a dark, cool blue. Spirit reeds grew in clumps along the banks, tall and feathery, their tips glowing faintly gold, and a pair of white herons stood on one leg in the shallows on the far side.

The afternoon sun lay across the surface and turned it into a sheet of hammered silver that hurt to look at.

They walked down to the water's edge and stood admiring it for a while. Cao Ning crouched to trail her fingers through the shallows, and the water was cold and clean, and she flicked a few drops at Yan Chi's face and laughed when he flinched.

While they stood stretching their legs on the bank, Wang Xuan tried to impress Cao Ning with a story about his tutor, who had made him hold a horse stance at dawn until his legs cried for mercy and his sweat made a puddle on the floor. He told it well, with gestures.

He made the tutor sound like a demon from the lowest hell. Yan Chi ruined the whole thing by remembering aloud that Wang Xuan had bribed the same tutor with jars of his father's best wine on two separate occasions to shorten the stance to half an hour.

Cao Ning laughed — a real laugh this time, short and bright — and both young men went quiet for a heartbeat at the sound of it, as though they had glimpsed a rare spirit beast in the reeds. The lake breeze came up across the water and pressed her breast strips flat against her nipples, outlining them clearly through the thin blue cloth. Neither of the boys looked away fast enough. She noticed. The purr noticed. Her face heated, and she turned toward the water to hide it.

Suddenly Wang Xuan clapped his hands. "Why don't we have a contest? Running on the water. First to the far shore wins."

Cultivators could run on water by channeling qi into the soles of their feet. It was easy enough in theory, a basic skill taught in the first year of Qi Refining, though holding it for long distances at speed took real control. Yan Chi and Cao Ning looked at each other, and then at Wang Xuan's round belly, and silently wondered where his confidence came from. Then, by the same silent agreement, they decided not to discourage him, and played along.

Wang Xuan, undeterred by their looks, made a great show of preparing. He untied the sash of his brocade outer robe and then, after a moment's thought, tied it again, explaining that the robe was lucky. He did three deep knee bends that made his knees crack like kindling.

He cracked his knuckles one at a time. He announced that his tutor had taught him a secret footwork technique called Dragonfly Skimming the Pond, which would make him lighter than a leaf, and that he had been practicing it in his father's fish pond every morning for a month.

"How many times did you fall in?" Yan Chi asked. Wang Xuan said, with great dignity, that the number was not important, and that the fish had stopped being frightened of him after the first week.

They lined up on the bank, side by side, toes at the edge of the water.

Cao Ning slipped off her sandals and left them in the grass, and stood with her bare toes curled over the edge of the bank and her arms loose at her sides. She rolled her shoulders.

She took one long breath and let it out, and Yan Chi, standing beside her, felt her qi gather — a dense, smooth swell of power that rose up through her body and pooled in the soles of her feet, far stronger than anything he remembered sensing from her before.

He looked at her sideways in surprise. She did not look back. Her eyes were on the far shore, narrowed against the glare, and her face had gone still and hard and beautiful in a way he had only ever seen when she held a sword.

"On three," Yan Chi said. "One. Two. Three —"

They shot out onto the lake.

Qi flared under three pairs of feet in three different flavors: Yan Chi's newly confident circulation, dense and fast from the Divine Method; Cao Ning's widened flow, smooth and powerful and faintly warm with the strange new current running through it; and Wang Xuan's borrowed-technique scramble, frantic and uneven.

The water dimpled beneath each footfall and held. Spray kicked up behind them in glittering arcs. The herons on the far shore lifted into the air with slow, offended wingbeats.

A fisherman sitting on a rock at the eastern edge of the lake looked up from his line, saw three figures racing across the surface, and swore he was seeing immortals — and then watched the fat one wobble and revised his prayer into laughter.

Yan Chi took the lead almost at once. His robes snapped behind him in the wind of his speed, and he was grinning, sharp and wild, the old Earth part of him delighted beyond words that he could do this, that he was running on water like a hero in a game.

Cao Ning followed close behind, her body low and efficient, her silver hair streaming back like a banner, her breast strips fluttering dangerously in the wind. Wang Xuan lagged further and further behind, his belly bouncing, his face red, pouring qi into his feet in panicked bursts to keep from sinking.

From behind, he watched them pull away. And then he saw something that stopped his breath.

As Cao Ning ran faster, the wind of her speed caught the short rear panel of her dress and lifted it straight up behind her like a flag. Her ass came into full view. It was perfect — two full, round, flawlessly pale cheeks, firm and high, clenching and releasing with every stride — and, as Wang Xuan's brain short-circuited, he saw that she was wearing no underwear at all.

Her ass was bare. Her crack was bare. And between her thighs, when her stride opened them, he glimpsed the pink hint of everything the rear panel was supposed to hide. Whether the string had been forgotten that morning in her strange new habits or had never been there at all, the result was the same: the most beautiful ass he had ever seen was bouncing ahead of him across open water in the afternoon sun.

The spray haloed her legs in rainbows. The sunlight turned each cheek into a glowing moon. When she leaned forward for more speed, the cleft between them deepened and opened, and for one holy instant he saw the tight pink flower of her anus and, below it, the plump lips of her pussy from behind, pink and shining, before the panel fluttered half down again and covered them.

His cock went hard as iron inside his trousers.

His qi scrambled. His concentration died on the spot. His feet stuttered on the surface, once, twice, and then the lake, patient and cold, simply opened beneath him and accepted his heavy body with a splash that sent the herons wheeling up into the sky again.

He went under. He came up spluttering and thrashing, his fine brocade robe ballooning around him, and shouted for help with his arms flailing and his mouth half full of water. He had never learned to swim. Merchant sons did not swim; they hired boats.

Yan Chi was already too far ahead to hear him over the rush of his own speed and the wind in his ears.

Cao Ning, not so far ahead, heard the cries. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Wang Xuan going under for the second time.

"Idiot," she muttered. "Wang Xuan can't even run." She turned in a wide spray of water and raced back toward him.

She was a good swimmer; she had grown up swimming in the river below the Cao compound every summer, and getting wet did not frighten her. She reached his thrashing form in a dozen strides, let her water-walking qi go, and dropped into the lake beside him. The cold closed over her shoulders and made her gasp.

She grabbed his flailing hand as he struggled to stay afloat under his own weight. Hope lit his face. He held on — and then, in a panic, lunged and wrapped both of his arms tightly around her chest.

His arms closed over her breasts and squeezed hard through the thin strips of cloth. His fingers sank into the warm, yielding flesh. Her nipples were crushed flat under his forearms. Cao Ning gasped and kicked hard to keep both of them at the surface under his weight, water sloshing over her face, her silver hair darkening and spreading out around them on the water.

For Wang Xuan the embrace was an accidental heaven. Her breasts were full and heavy in his arms, and warm even in the cold lake water, pressed against his forearms so tightly that he could feel their shape exactly.

His fingers, scrabbling for purchase in his panic, dug in deeper and rolled across a stiff nipple through the wet cloth — and a jolt of electricity went through both of them. Cao Ning's pussy clenched under the water. The lust-qi in her meridians sang.

She was afraid that if she threw him off he would sink and drown.

"Let me go," she gasped, her face burning, her body sparking traitorously at the forced embrace. "Let go of me. Hold on to my legs and just follow me."

Wang Xuan, calmer now that he was not actually drowning, released her chest with visible reluctance. He let himself slide down her body in the water and grabbed her right leg with both hands instead, clinging to it like a barnacle to a rock, and stopped thrashing. His palms wrapped around her thigh.

His cheek nearly pressed against her wet skin. And from that angle, looking up through the clear water, he could see the underside of her ass and the shadowed place between her legs where lake water and her own heat mixed. He held very still. He held very happily.

He had dreamed about Cao Ning more nights than he would ever admit, like half the young men in Jinling, but he had never in his wildest imaginings pictured this: the cold green water, the sun on the surface above, her long leg in his arms and her bare skin slick and cool against his cheek, the slow powerful scissor of her other leg kicking past his face, and above him, through the shifting water, the pale undercurve of her ass flexing with every stroke.

A small fish darted past his nose. He did not see it. The towing began.

In the water, Cao Ning had nothing to think with but her body. The cold bit at her skin and the green depths fell away beneath her into darkness, and every stroke she pulled dragged the full weight of Wang Xuan's bulk behind her like a sack of wet grain.

Her thigh burned where he clung to it. His fingers were warm against her cold skin, warmer than the water, and she could feel every one of them, ten distinct points of heat pressed into the flesh of her leg.

Each time she kicked with her free leg, her bare pussy opened and closed under the short floating panel, and the cold water rushed against her there in a shocking caress, and she knew — she knew without looking back — that from where he hung, he could see.

The purr in her meridians knew it too. It curled and stretched and hummed with a warmth that the lake could not reach, and she swam harder, as if she could outswim it.

It was hard work. She swam with a strong stroke, kicking with her free leg and occasionally pushing off the surface with a quick burst of water-walking qi, dragging his weight behind her toward the shore. Water got into her mouth once and she spat it out. Wang Xuan apologized to her thigh, as though the thigh might forgive him. Across the lake, she heard Yan Chi's voice carrying over the water — her name, and then Wang Xuan's, and then a laugh he was failing to swallow.

Wang Xuan's hands stayed locked on her right thigh. His thumbs lay dangerously near the inner face of it, and every few strokes they slipped upward a little, entirely by accident, until she snapped his name over her shoulder like a whip. He apologized and the thumbs slid back down. Then, a few strokes later, they slipped up again.

Her soaked breast strips had gone almost completely transparent. The pale blue cloth clung to her skin like a second skin, and her pink nipples showed through it clearly to anyone who looked — to Wang Xuan, looking up from her thigh; to the reeds, nodding on the bank; to heaven itself.

She wanted to reach the shore more than she wanted her dignity. And underneath the panic and the anger, she felt the same filthy pleasure at being stared at that had haunted her for two days. The cold lake water could not kill it. Her master's widening had made sure of that.

Each kick made her breasts bounce and sway in the soaked strips, half free. Each stroke made Wang Xuan's hands slide a fraction higher on her thigh, toward dangerous territory. She barked at him to stop moving his fingers. He apologized again, and did not entirely stop. The purr in her meridians rose to meet his touch, warm and pleased. She hated that it purred.

He had reached the far shore first and turned with his arms raised in triumph, already composing the speech in which he would mock them both for losing, and found the lake behind him empty except for a churning patch of water and a silver head bobbing beside it. For a moment he did not understand what he was seeing. Then he did.

He started back at once, skimming the surface in long strides — and then slowed, and stopped, knee-deep in the reeds of the shallows on the near bank where the race had begun, because he saw that she already had Wang Xuan. His childhood goddess was hauling his fat friend toward the shore like a dripping prize, steady and furious, and there was nothing for him to do but wait for her to arrive.

The scene hit him in layers. First worry. Then amusement, at the sight of Wang Xuan clinging to her leg with his brocade robe floating around him like a lily pad. Then a sharp, hot spike of jealousy when he saw where Wang Xuan's hands were locked on her bare thigh, and how the soaked cloth was plastered to her breasts, outlining everything. He stood in the cold water with the reeds brushing his knees and his fists closed at his sides, and watched her come.

She came on stroke by stroke through the green water, her silver hair dark and streaming behind her, her face set and pale with effort, Wang Xuan trailing from her leg like a fat, blissful anchor. The sun lay across the lake behind them in a sheet of hammered silver.

The herons had settled again on the far side. Cao Ning lifted her head once to find the bank, saw him standing there waiting, and her eyes met his across the last stretch of water, gray and furious and something else he could not read.

Then she put her head down and swam the last strokes toward the shallows where he stood.