Chapter 312 The Way Back

They were on the track before the light was properly up, because the glass gave them three days and the road took two, and one of those was going to be slow.

Neither of them was in any condition to be walking. Qingluo had an arm she could not use and a shoulder that had been out and back in, and Xuan had a chest that produced blood every time he coughed and a standing order not to move qi through any of it. He could not run Cloud Step over the bad ground, which meant the bad ground had to be walked.

"Tell me if it turns dark," she said, somewhere in the first hour. "Bright and thin is a small tear. Dark is a different conversation."

"It’s bright."

"Then we keep the pace and I stop asking."

What surprised him was how little talking the day needed. On the way in she had spent two days telling him where to put his feet. Now she stepped and he stepped where she had stepped, without either of them marking it, and when she slowed at a stand of reeds he was already going wide before she had lifted her hand.

She started handing him things before he asked for them. The leaf tin came over her shoulder at the hour it always came. When they reached the brown pool she had the strip of cloth out and the tube filled while he was still shrugging the pack off, and she tested it one-handed with her teeth on the stopper and passed the skins back to him full.

At the bad crossing past the second stand of trees he put his hands out for the case without a word and she gave it to him without one, which on the way down would have taken an argument and a reason.

[ I notice she stopped telling you what’s in things.]

’She stopped telling me two days ago.’

[ She stopped explaining two days ago. Today she stopped announcing.] A pause. [ That’s not nothing, and you should know what it is when you walk it back into a house full of your own people.]

He knew what it was. He decided to say the necessary part before the road did it for him.

They ate at midday on a dry bank with the case between them and the last of the water, and he waited until she had finished chewing, because doing it while she ate would have been cheap.

"You should hear something from me rather than from Ah-Ping," he said. "I’m married."

Qingluo went on capping the water skin.

"Her name’s Qingyue. She’s the one you’d have seen on the third terrace, at the trough, watching you walk past a bench." He kept his voice ordinary. "I’m telling you now because we’re going to be on a road together for a long time, and I’d rather you had it from me on a bank with nobody watching."

"I know who she is." She pushed the stopper in with the heel of her hand. "I worked it out at the fire on the way in, when I asked whether anybody ever tells you you’re wrong and you answered in one word and didn’t decorate it."

"That’s most of it."

"Then here’s mine, and it’s two things, and you get both." She turned round to face him properly. "I’m not going to sit here and tell you it makes no difference to me, because I don’t lie about my own readings and I’d be insulting us both. And I’m not going to do anything with it. Not a look, not a hand on an arm, nothing that makes a woman stand in her own doorway working out what she’s looking at."

"That’s more than I’d have asked for."

"It’s not for you." Qingluo got her feet under her and stood. "She’s held a house together while her husband walked into a hole in the ground with a stranger. I’m not going to be the thing she has to manage on top of that."

"And if it gets in the way of the work?"

"Then I’ll say so once, to you, and never to her." She slung her pack with her good arm. "Now get up. The glass doesn’t care about any of this."

The last melon came out at the second rest of the afternoon. He had been carrying it since Ah-Ping put it in his pack and it had outlived its three brothers and every plan either of them had made, and by then it was warm and softening and the last thing on this earth he wanted to eat.

Qingluo cut it on her knee with the small knife, one-handed and badly, and held out the bigger half. Xuan took it and ate it, and it was two hours later, walking, when he noticed that he had not looked at it first.

"The first one was a document," he said.

"That’s an interesting way to describe a piece of fruit." She wiped her fingers down her trousers. "What was it, if we’re being honest about it?"

"A test. You cut it in front of me over a forty foot drop and you wanted to see whether I’d ask what was in it."

"It was both, and you passed, and you have never once asked." She let a few steps go by. "This one’s just melon."

The country dried out through the afternoon, and by the time the light went long the water had stopped being on both sides of them and the ground had stopped trying to take his boots.

She talked while they walked and most of it was work, which he was glad of, because the alternative would have been thinking about his own chest.

"The draw goes to the bench first, not to your alchemist. Nobody argues about that, including me, because everything in that tube has to be read before a drop of it goes into a man." She said it over her shoulder. "It’ll cost us four hours and it’s not negotiable, and Lian will hate it until she sees who’s doing the reading."

"And after?"

"After, I want the sample kept where I can put my hand on it, and not in my grandmother’s store, because things in my grandmother’s store come out when she decides and not when I ask." A dozen paces. "I’ll need to rebuild my travelling case as well. Half of what I own only works at a bench, and there’s a great deal I can’t carry, and I want three months of the things I can’t replace on a road."

"Three months is a long trip."

"It’s a long road, and I don’t know how long, which is why I’d rather carry the three and be wrong." She stepped over a root and did not look back at him. "And whatever I take out of that house, I take it out properly. No sneaking. I’m not leaving my grandmother a mystery to solve while she’s running a valley."

He let that go past without putting a hand on it. She had said it to the track in front of her and not to him, which he took to mean she wanted it in the air rather than answered.

[ Did you catch it?]

’I caught it.’

[ She’s not packing for a fortnight and a courier run. She’s packing to be gone.] Mira sounded thoughtful rather than pleased. [ And she said it out loud to you and not to her grandmother, which means you’re the first person who knows.]

They came to the leaning post an hour before dusk on the second day. There were five notches in it now. Four of them were grey and old and worn soft at the edges, and the fifth was pale and sharp and had sap dried in the bottom of the cut.

Qingluo stopped and looked at it for a moment with her thumb on the new one.

"She cut it the morning we went down," she said.

"There’s no sixth."

"You’re not hers to count." She took her thumb off the wood and started walking again. "If you want one, go and ask her for it, and bring me along to watch."

The last rise was the long one, and they came over it in the grey part of the evening, and the terraces were laid out below them with the mist already coming down off the glass.

Xuan stopped walking before he had worked out why. There were people on the low gate. Not two, the way there had been every day he had lived in that house, but a line of them, and lamps lit along the wall at an hour when nobody lit lamps on that wall. Below the gate, on the road, a picket of horses stood tied in an even row with a man walking down the line of them, and the horses were far too good for that valley. Something hung above the gatehouse that had not been there when they left, and it was too dark to read and too big to be a house banner.

Qingluo had gone entirely still beside him. "That’s not a trader," she said.