Chapter 316: Three Women and a Very Tired Man

He went looking for his wife after the midday bell and found Tianming standing outside the east rooms with a bowl in his hands and the expression of a man guarding a door he does not want opened.

"How long have they been in there?"

"Two hours." The boy did not move out of the way so much as stop existing in it. "Ah-Ping’s been in three times. She hasn’t come out the last time."

Xuan pushed the door open on the three of them. Qingyue was sitting on the chest by the window with one ankle over the other. Qingluo had the stool, turned around, with her forearms across the back of it. Between them, on the low table, was a pot of tea that had been refilled more than once, and Ah-Ping was on the floor by the wall with her knees up, doing nothing whatsoever and not intending to leave.

"Sit down," Qingyue said, without looking round. "We’re not finished."

He sat down. It appeared to be the only move available to him.

"Eighty-eight," Qingluo said, picking up whatever had been interrupted. "Eighty-eight breaths of holding, from the first exhalation to the moment I capped the tube."

"And what had he done the day before?"

"Forty-one, unprotected, and he was finished at thirty-five and didn’t know it." Qingluo did not soften a syllable of that. "The mix bought him the difference. Without it we’d have come up that slope with nothing and one of us would have been carried."

Qingyue turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "What did you put in him?"

"A binder. It lines the airway and goes into the blood and it eats the exhalation before his body gets a chance to. Two doses, the second given at the halfway mark because of the dead channel." A pause, and then the rest of it, unasked. "It cost him fine feeling in the hands, half a breath of reflex, and the whole of his qi at volume. For the duration he was a man with a sword and no art."

"Who agreed to that?"

"He did, on the slope, with the numbers in front of him and me telling him what could go wrong first." Qingluo’s chin came up half an inch. "I gave him the failure before I gave him the benefit. If you’re going to ask me one more question about consent, ask it now and I’ll answer it, and then I’d like to stop being examined."

"That was the last one." Qingyue drank. "You gave him the bad half first. Most people in your trade give it second, and quieter."

Ah-Ping, from the floor, said nothing at all and looked extremely busy about it.

"He counts for other people," Qingluo said, after a moment. "Did you know that? He counted out loud for me for eighty-eight breaths so I’d know where we were without looking up, and he got the number right the whole way, and in the middle of it he took a breath that opened something in his chest and he didn’t mention it until we were up the slope and I could see the blood."

"He was on twelve when I met him." Qingyue set the cup down. "Twelve years old, holding a training post upright for a boy who’d been made to stand at it, with a broken finger he didn’t mention for two days."

"So he doesn’t count himself."

"He has never counted himself once. It isn’t bravery and it isn’t stupidity, it’s an arithmetic he was taught early and nobody has been able to take off him." Qingyue’s voice stayed perfectly level. "So I do it for him. That’s the whole of what I’m for, in a room like this."

"I’ve been doing it since the shelf," Qingluo said.

"I know. I watched you do it at the gate, before you said hello to anybody." Qingyue finally looked at her properly. "That’s why this conversation has been as short as it has."

"I’m sitting here," Xuan said.

"We know," both of them said, and neither of them looked at him.

Ah-Ping made a noise into her own sleeve, got up, went out, and came back forty seconds later with a fresh pot that nobody had asked for. The pleasant part of the afternoon lasted about that long.

"Next time," Qingyue said, "I want the number before, and not after."

"The number before what?"

"Before you put him in front of something. You knew what forty-one meant on that slope, and you knew it three days before he walked into that bowl, and you told him on the night you needed to tell him." Qingyue leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "I’m not saying you were wrong. I’m saying there are four people on this mountain who belong to me, and one of them is him, and I will not find out what they’ve been standing in after it’s finished."

"If I tell you every number before I use it, the work dies." Qingluo’s voice had cooled all the way down. "You’d have told me no at the sink. You’d have been sensible and you’d have been right by your own measure, and your man in the north would be dead in eleven days, and I’d have watched you make that choice with a perfectly clear conscience."

"Then say the thing you’re actually saying."

"You count what a thing costs in people." Qingluo did not blink. "I count what it costs in work not done. The second one has names in it too. It’s just that nobody puts them in front of you, because they die three valleys away and six months later and my house writes them in a book."

Nobody said anything. Out on the terrace somebody dropped something and swore.

"Four hundred and eleven names," Qingyue said.

Qingluo’s head came round, and for once there was nothing prepared on her face at all.

"He didn’t tell me. You did, at the gate, when you said the road back cost you four days and you’d rather have spent six." Qingyue sat back. "I’ve had a week to work out what you are, and that’s most of it."

"Then you’ve reached a conclusion."

"You’d spend him."

"I’d spend myself first, and I did, and you can look at my arm." Qingluo said it without heat. "That isn’t the answer you want and it’s the only honest one I have."

They sat in that for a moment. Neither of them moved and neither of them was remotely embarrassed, and Ah-Ping had stopped pretending to be furniture. "The number before, then," Qingyue said. "Not permission. You don’t need my permission and you wouldn’t take it. The number, in advance, to me, and I’ll decide what I do with it on my own."

Qingluo thought about that for longer than she had thought about anything else all afternoon.

"Done," she said. "And the same the other way, because you know things about him I don’t, and last week I nearly mixed for a man on the wrong assumption."

"You’ll get them."

Ah-Ping, still on the floor, let out a breath she had apparently been holding for some time, and both of them looked at her, and she said she was going to see about supper and did not move.

Qingyue came to their room that night with her hair already down and sat on the chest instead of the bed. "She travels with us," she said. "I’ve decided, and I’d have decided it whether you wanted it or not, so you may as well have the reasons."

"She’s the only person alive who understands what’s inside you, and she’s proved twice that she’ll tell you a thing she’d rather not say. That’s rarer than the skill." Qingyue pulled a pin out and set it down. "And she doesn’t want anything off you. I’ve been watching for it all week, the way you watch a merchant’s hands, and there’s nothing there. What she wants is the man in the white robe, and she’d walk with a stranger to get him."

"That’s two."

"Here’s the third, and it’s the one I came in here to say." She turned to face him properly. "This afternoon she told me she’d need three months of supply she can’t replace on a road, and how she’d rebuild her case, and what she wouldn’t be able to carry. All of that I’d expect."

"Say the part I’m missing."

"She never once said it depended on her grandmother." Qingyue set the second pin down beside the first. "A woman who has spent her whole life in that house, planning to leave it, and not one conditional sentence in an hour." Her eyes came up. "Somebody has already decided this. And it isn’t her, and it certainly isn’t you."