Chapter 31

Chapter 31: Chapter 31

She had only come to bring him tea.

That was what Su Lanying told herself afterward, lying awake on Frost Lotus Peak with the shutters thrown open and the freezing wind pouring in. Physician Bai had mentioned he hadn’t slept a wink since the tournament. He had gone back down into the mines after midnight. So she had filled a lacquered flask with mountain-snow tea and followed him down, meaning only to set it beside him and leave.

Then she had reached the mouth of the crawlway and heard his voice.

He was speaking to someone. Low and hoarse in the pitch black, yet there was no one in the chamber to answer him. She had stopped dead with the warm flask in her hands and listened, and she had kept listening, and by the time she understood what she was hearing, it was far too late to walk away.

His mother. Alive. Locked in a stone cell in the north, kept well so that she would last.

And then his voice, tearing out of the dark: I won’t do that. Not to her. Everyone in her entire life has used her. I won’t be one more.

Lanying had sunk down into the rubble with the tea flask forgotten beside her boot and her frost creeping across the floor, completely unable to make herself stand up again.

When he finally turned his head and saw her, his face had gone chalk-white.

She would remember that look for a very long time. Yan Shuo—who had stood up seven times under Chi Yao’s fire with his expression completely blank—staring at her across the dark chamber as if she had caught him with his chest cut open and his heart lying bare on the stone.

"How much?" he asked quietly.

"Enough."

He closed his eyes.

"I won’t tell a soul," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Not my master. Not anyone. You have my word."

"I know." He opened his eyes again. They looked impossibly tired. "Senior Sister. Please go home."

She should have argued. She had argued with him three nights ago in this exact same chamber, and she had won. Yet his face was so raw, so exposed and hollowed out by a shame she had never seen on him before, that she understood at once.

So she picked up the forgotten flask, set it gently on the stone beside him, and went home.

She did not ask who he had been talking to in the dark. She had promised never to ask why their cultivation worked. She suspected both questions shared the exact same answer.

The summons arrived at dawn.

A servant from Cloudpiercer Peak brought it up to Frost Lotus Peak on a lacquered tray: the Sect Master requested the presence of Elder Shen and her senior disciple in the main hall at the third bell. Elder Shen read the slip standing in her doorway, folded it once, and handed it to Lanying without a single word.

They walked to Cloudpiercer Peak in total silence.

The main hall was full of morning light and bright gold. The Sect Master sat in his carved chair at the head of the dais, wearing his smile. Beside him sat a white-haired envoy of the Chi Clan draped in red-and-gold brocade, and beside the envoy stood Chi Yao, resplendent and effortless, his hands clasped loosely behind his back.

He smiled warmly at her as she stepped over the threshold. Beneath her leather bracer, the cracked brand prickled.

"Ah," the Sect Master said warmly. "Our Frost Lotus. Come in, come in."

The whole affair took less than a quarter of an hour.

The envoy spoke at grand length of the deep friendship between the Chi Clan and the Azure Cloud Sect. The Sect Master spoke at grand length of the exact same thing. The Chi Clan’s earth masters were already assembled. The Grade-3 spirit vein that would feed the mountain for fifty years could be drawn up and moved in a single month. All that remained, the envoy declared smoothly, was the joyous matter of the wedding itself—which the Chi Patriarch hoped would take place without further delay.

"Thirty days," the Sect Master announced, beaming down from the dais. "On the very first day of the new season. The sect astrologers assure me it is the most auspicious date in a decade."

Lanying stood dead straight beside her master and kept her face carved from ice.

Thirty days.

"How wonderful," Chi Yao murmured. He strolled across the hall toward her, took her left hand in both of his, lifted it, and pressed his mouth to the white leather buckled over her wrist. Directly over the brand. His lips were dry and very warm. "I’ve been counting the days, my dear. Now I may finally count them backward."

The ruined brand burned. Only for a breath. Just enough to remind her that skin to skin, the leash still held.

Lanying looked down at the crown of his bowed head and replied, in a voice like a slamming door, "So have I."

Beside her, Elder Shen made no sound at all. Yet on the long walk back to Frost Lotus Peak, the old woman stopped at the top of the stone stair and stood looking out over the churning cloudsea for a long, quiet stretch, her hands tucked neatly into her sleeves. When she finally spoke, she didn’t turn her head.

"I am sorry," said Elder Shen Qiuhua, who had not apologized for a single thing in thirty years.

Then she walked on.

Lanying went straight to her ice cave.

It lay high on the north face of Frost Lotus Peak, a deep hollow carved into the glacier where the daylight filtered through the ceiling in a dim, freezing blue. She had spent a hundred days inside it once, entirely alone, and found it peaceful. Today she sat cross-legged on the bare ice at the center of the cavern, hands resting on her knees, and forced herself to think clearly, like her master had taught her to.

Part one. His mother was alive, locked away somewhere in the freezing north, held by people wealthy and ruthless enough to buy a living woman for three hundred high-grade spirit stones. And he meant to tear her out. Lanying had never heard anyone say anything with as much quiet, terrifying certainty as he had whispered that vow into his own palms in the dark.

Part two. He stood at the eighth layer of Qi Gathering. He was a world away from strong enough. Whoever guarded those northern cells would stand high above anything he had ever faced.

Part three. There was a way for him to climb faster. She didn’t know the name of the art, and she was bound by her word not to ask. Yet she knew what it did. Three layers in a single night. White frost blooming across black stone. Her own bottleneck, frozen solid for three years, melting away beneath his palms. And she had heard him say it aloud himself: the fastest way up the mountain was her.

Part four. He had refused to take it.

She sat with that part for a long, aching time.

He had refused because everyone in her life had used her. He had said so into the pitch black, his voice scraping raw, speaking to someone she couldn’t see. He had looked straight at the quickest road to his mother’s freedom and turned his back on it, simply because walking that road meant treating Su Lanying like a tool.

No one in her entire life had ever refused to use her.

She found her eyes were stinging. She blinked hard against the cold and forced herself to move on.

Part five. Thirty days.

In thirty days, she would walk into the main hall on Cloudpiercer Peak draped in red wedding silk and become the lawful property of the Chi Clan. Chi Yao would carry her south to Blazing Sun City. She would never ride the rusted lift down into the ninth level with a jade disc in her sleeve again. She would never sit in the burned chamber with her hands resting beneath his. Whatever she had left to give him, she had precisely thirty days to give it.

She examined each part in the dim blue light, just as her master had trained her to do. Then she looked for the error in the arithmetic.

She couldn’t find one.

She had been raised her whole life to be useful. Since she was nine years old, every elder on this mountain had drilled the lesson into her bones. Her sword belonged to the sect. Her cultivation belonged to the sect. Her body and her marriage belonged to the sect, weighed and traded for fifty years of a spirit vein. She had always given whatever was asked of her, because giving was the only thing she had ever been taught how to do.

Only this time, no one had asked.

This time, the one person who desperately needed what she had was refusing to take a single drop of it.

So she would give it to him anyway. Not out of duty but out of choice. Thirty days of whatever passed between them in the dark. Every single night, as deep as he would take her. Enough to carry him as high up the mountain as she possibly could, before the red silk and the gates of Blazing Sun City swallowed her whole.

Sitting on the ancient ice in the blue gloom, it seemed to her the bravest, truest thing she had ever decided to do.

It did not occur to her—not even once—that she had simply found a gentler name for the oldest habit she possessed.

She waited until the dormitories went dark.

As the tournament champion, Yan Shuo had been awarded a private room of his own in the Outer Valley, one of the small stone cells tucked at the very end of the senior outer disciples’ row. Lanying knew precisely which door was his. She had known since the afternoon the reward was posted, though she had spent three days lying to herself that she hadn’t paid attention.

She dressed with great care. A plain grey traveling cloak with the deep hood drawn up, and nothing at all beneath it save a thin sleeping robe of white silk. She bound her silver hair high with the pin of carved ice. Once, before leaving, she looked at her reflection in the polished bronze mirror on her wall and turned away before her nerve could break.

The path down the mountain was icy and dead still. Not a single night watchman saw her pass.

She reached the far end of the senior outer disciples’ row, stopped before the final wooden door, and stood there in the pitch dark for a long moment, her heart hammering so loudly against her ribs she was certain he could hear it through the stone.

Then Su Lanying, the Frost Lotus Fairy, the most valuable bride in the Azure Cloud Sect, lifted her hand and knocked on his door.