Chapter 299: Terms

The fourth terrace yard was longer than it was wide, walled on the uphill side by the back of a long house and open on the other to the drop. Racks of drying stalks stood along one wall. Two channels of water crossed the stone and went out through a grate at the low end, and the mist off the terrace above came down into the yard and sat there.

Qingluo was waiting when he got there, barefoot, sleeves tied back, with a satchel on the wall behind her and no sword anywhere.

"Rules," she said. "You stop when I say stop. I stop when you say stop. Nothing permanent."

"Agreed."

"And don’t hold back to be polite. If you go easy I’ll learn nothing and we’ll have to do it again tomorrow."

Xuan drew Marrow Dragon and stood with the point down, weight on his back foot. Awakening Dragon, the first form, the one that asks the other person to commit first.

Qingluo didn’t commit. She walked, along the wall, at an angle that made no sense for a fight, and she tipped a rack of stalks with her hip on the way past and came out near the grate. The mist moved after her and then kept moving, sliding down the yard with the cold air off the channels, and it came to Xuan instead of to her.

He took a breath and tasted the terrace on it, green and thin and sweet. The air in this yard had come to him, and she was the one who had sent it.

’She’s not coming.’

[ No. She’s arranging the room. Move.]

He moved. Cloud Step put him across the yard in one pass, and he came out of it a pace from her shoulder with the blade already turning.

She was gone before the turn finished. No flourish, no counter, only three steps that took her out of his line and put her back in the seam where the two channels met, and his cut went through the place she had been standing. He turned to follow, and his boot came down in water.

Xuan opened the Plum Blossom Sword. It bloomed the way it always did, sword-light unfolding all at once, dozens of petals opening around her from every angle with one real edge hidden in the middle of the lie. It was the most beautiful thing he owned, and in a year of using it he had never seen anybody stand still in front of it.

Qingluo went backwards out of the whole thing. She didn’t hunt for the real petal, she gave up the ground instead, all of it, three long steps and then a fourth, and the flowers closed on empty air a full pace short of her hip. One petal caught her sleeve and took a line off her forearm on the way past, and she glanced at the blood and kept moving and left it there.

"That’s very pretty," she said. "Do it again."

He did not do it again. Twice would have given her the shape of it, and she had the look of a woman who only needed to see a thing twice.

’She’s not fighting me.’

[ She’s fighting the yard. Look at where she stands and stop looking at her hands.]

She was standing downhill of him again. The mist off the terrace came down and rolled over him and went out through the grate at her back, and in the ten minutes since he had walked in here he had put himself in the wet three times and she had not stepped in it once.

He went after her properly then. Coiling Dragon to take the space, Twin Dragon Strike when she broke to his left, and he was faster than her by a wide margin and it did not matter, because she treated his sword as weather. She went where it was not. When she had nowhere to go she put a rack between them, and when he cut the rack in half she was already out the other side, and the dust of whatever had been drying on it came up into the air in a cloud. Xuan went through the cloud, because there was nothing on the far side of it except her.

Twenty breaths later his legs were wrong. It came on slowly and politely, and it did not show. His hands were still fast, his feet still went where he sent them and arrived a fraction after he expected, and his next exhale came out shorter than he had meant it to.

’Mira.’

[ I see it. I can’t tell you what it is. That’s not what I do.]

Qingluo stopped on the far side of the yard, and folded her arms, and waited to see what he did next. That was the part that landed hardest. She was not pressing her advantage. She was watching her work.

Xuan stopped chasing. He turned his attention inward instead and ran it along his own flow, the way the Venom Serpent had taught him to, and he found it on the second lap.

There was a trace in the current that had no business being there, thin and sour and moving with his qi rather than his blood. It was riding the circulation. Every lap it came round it took a little more of the closing speed out of his hands, and it was doing it evenly, patiently, without ever touching anything that would stop his heart.

’It’s in the flow. It’s not in the wound, it’s in the qi.’

[ Then stop giving it a ride.]

He shut his breathing down to the short, high, shallow rhythm he had watched a hundred people in green use on the way up the terraces. He dropped the Nine Dragons Breathing Art entirely, because it opened him, and opened was the last thing he wanted. Then he put the circulation method underneath everything and moved his qi off the wide roads onto the narrow ones, around the scar and around the loaded channels both.

The slide stopped inside four breaths. What was already in him stayed in him, and it stopped getting worse.

Across the yard, Qingluo’s arms came uncrossed. "Hm," she said.

Xuan moved, and he did not go for her. He went for the yard, because she had been right about it from the first minute and he had been slow to agree. Cloud Step took him up onto the wall, and he opened the Plum Blossom Sword above the yard with the petals turned flat and set them spinning through the mist.

Nineteen forms of the prettiest sword art on the shelf, used to move air. The petals shredded the cloud hanging over the low end and pushed it out over the drop, the yard between them came clear, and the seam by the grate stopped being worth anything to anybody. She had to come to him then, and she came fast, and she came with her hand closed.

He met her with Coiling Dragon. Her wrist went around the circle, the little roll of silk in her fingers came loose, and he took her arm out of line and turned her, and Marrow Dragon came up under her ribs and stopped there with the flat against her skin.

Her free hand was flat on his sternum. He could feel two fingers of pressure through his shirt, a grit of powder under them, and the small wet patch where it had already started going in. Neither of them moved for three breaths.

"Stop," Qingluo said.

"Stop," Xuan agreed, and took the blade off her.

She stepped back and turned her arm over to look at the cut on her forearm, which had stopped bleeding on its own and was the only mark on her. Then she wiped her palm clean on her thigh, twice, and shook out her fingers.

"You had me," she said.

"You had me at the same time."

"I had your chest. You had my liver, and you were in first by about a quarter of a breath, and you turned the edge." She said it in a flat, working voice. "Say why."

"Because I came here for an antidote and a name, and you’re the only person on this mountain who can give me either."

"That’s a good answer. It isn’t the true one." She picked her satchel off the wall. "You turned it before you thought about any of that. I watched your wrist."

Xuan didn’t answer. His hands were still half a beat behind where he wanted them, and there was a taste in the back of his mouth that had not been there an hour ago.

"Sit down," Qingluo said. "On the wall, in the sun, and don’t circulate. Whatever you did in the middle there, keep doing it."

"Are you going to fix this?"

"Yes. I put it in you, so it’s mine to take out, and it’ll be out before breakfast." She crouched and started laying things on the stone in a row. "And while I’m in there I’m going to look at the rest of you."