Chapter 32

Chapter 32: Chapter 32

Yan Shuo was still awake when the knock came.

In fact he hadn’t slept properly in days. He sat on the edge of the narrow cot in his new room with the lamp turned low, the tea flask she’d left in the burned chamber standing unopened on the table, and he was trying, for the hundredth time, to work out how a boy at the eighth layer of Qi Gathering could walk into a place guarded by Golden Core wardens and walk out again with his mother.

He hadn’t found an answer. He was beginning to suspect there wasn’t one.

The knock came again.

He opened the door.

She stood in the dark outside with the hood of a grey cloak drawn up over her silver hair, and for a moment he didn’t recognize her. Then she lifted her head, and the lamplight caught her face and he stepped back without a word to let her in.

She crossed the threshold and he quickly closed the door behind her.

The room was small: a cot, a table, a chair, and a window no wider than his two hands. The champion’s reward. A month ago it would have seemed like a palace. Lanying stood in the middle of it and looked around once, taking everything in.

"Senior Sister," he said quietly. "It’s past midnight."

"I know what time it is."

She pushed back her hood. Then, without any hurry at all, she unclasped the grey cloak and let it fall to the floorboards.

Beneath it she wore only a thin sleeping robe of white silk. Her silver hair was bound high with the ice pin. The white leather bracer sat buckled around her left wrist. She stood dead straight in the dim lamplight with her hands at her sides and her chin lifted, and she did not blush—which was how he knew, instantly, just how terrified she was.

"The wedding is set," she said. "In just thirty days. The Sect Master announced it this morning."

"In thirty days," Lanying went on, "I will go to Blazing Sun City, and you will never see me again. Before then, you need to be much stronger than you are. I heard you say so. I heard you say the quickest way is me." Her voice didn’t waver a fraction. "So I have come to offer it. Every night, for thirty nights. As deep as you can take it. Whatever you need."

She drew a slow breath.

"Use me," she said. "Let me be useful to you. Your mother is alive, and you are going to get her back, and I want to help. This is the only way I know how."

The lamp hissed softly on the table. Somewhere far off in the Outer Valley, a dog barked twice and fell silent.

Yan Shuo looked at her for a long, quiet moment.

Then he bent down, picked up the grey cloak from the floor, and draped it gently back around her shoulders.

She stared at him.

"What are you doing?"

"You’ll catch a cold." He fastened the silver clasp at her throat carefully. "It’s freezing tonight."

"I’m an ice cultivator."

He stepped back a pace. She stood there wrapped in the heavy wool, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides, and her face went from chalk-white to scarlet and back to white again.

"You refuse," she said.

"Yes."

"Why?" Her voice rose, sharp and brittle in the tiny room. "You need this. You said so yourself. I’m offering it freely. Nobody is making me. Nobody even asked me. For the very first time in my life I have chosen something for myself, and you’re putting my cloak back on me as if I’m a child who wandered into the wrong room."

"You heard what I said in the chamber."

"I heard you say you wouldn’t use me."

"Then you heard why." He kept his voice low and level. "Senior Sister. Listen to the words you just used. Use me. Let me be useful." He met her eyes squarely. "That’s what they say to you. The sect. The Sect Master. Him. Your talent is useful, your marriage is useful, your body and your cultivation belong to whoever needs them most. You’ve heard it for so many years that you’ve started saying it to yourself."

Lanying went completely still.

"If I take you to bed tonight because I need to climb faster," Yan Shuo said softly, "then I am nothing more than one more man who looked at Su Lanying and saw a tool. I would rather walk into that place in the north at the eighth layer and die at the gate." His voice cracked, just barely. "I won’t do it. Not tonight, and not for thirty nights. Not like this."

The silence stretched out for a long time.

She stood with the rough cloak pulled around her and her pale eyes locked onto his face, and he watched her try to find the flaw in his arithmetic—the exact way she searched for a gap in an opponent’s guard. He watched her fail to find one.

The frost began at her boots.

It crept outward across the floorboards, thin and white, climbing the wooden legs of the table, frosting the forgotten tea flask until the lacquer rang. The lamp flame shrank down. Lanying’s next breath came out in a visible white cloud.

"You don’t understand," she whispered.

"Then tell me."

"You don’t understand," she said again, louder now, her voice shaking violently. "Usefulness has nothing to do with it. Your mother has nothing to do with it." She pressed both hands hard against her eyes. "I told myself it did. All day long, sitting in that ice cave, I told myself that. I made it all so neat and sensible. Thirty days. Help him climb. Do one thing worth doing before they pack me into red silk."

She lowered her hands. Her pale eyes were wet, bright, and utterly furious.

"But that was a lie," she said. "Just like the one I told you after the first night. A cultivation necessity. It changes nothing." She let out a laugh. "I’ve been lying to you since the fire. Every inspection. Every session. Every single time I rode down that lift with my jade disc and my neat little figures, pretending I cared a straw about the vein."

"Lanying—"

"I come down that lift because I want to see you."

She tore the words out fast, all at once, like a blade she wanted out of the wound quickly.

"I come to the chamber because I want to sit across from you in the dark. I bring tea because I like watching you drink it. I fought you in the pine clearing because I was jealous of a physician carrying a basket of herbs, and I have never been jealous of a living soul in my entire life." Her voice was trembling hard now. "I stood in front of Chi Yao on the Cloud Terrace and let him burn my wrist to the bone because I couldn’t bear to watch him touch you. And tonight I walked down this mountain and called it usefulness because I was too much of a coward to call it what it actually is."

The frost had reached the low ceiling. The oil lamp was a dying blue spark.

"I love you," said Su Lanying. "I love you, and in thirty days I have to marry someone else, and I don’t know what to do."

He crossed the room.

He didn’t remember deciding to move. One moment he was standing by the table, and the next he had her face cradled in both his hands, her freezing cheeks wet beneath his calloused palms, her eyes wide and terrified and fierce.

"Say it again," he rasped.

She stared up at him.

"Say it again. Please."

Her lips trembled. "I love you."

"I love you too," Yan Shuo said. "I’ve loved you since the morning you froze the floor of Medicine Valley. I just didn’t know the name for it. I’d never had anything like it before."

She made a ragged sound, half a sob and half a laugh.

Then he kissed her.

They had kissed before. Down in the burned chamber with her arm on fire. In the pitch dark after the tournament, angry and desperate and bleeding. Both times it had come wrapped in something else—a crisis, a survival method, the bond roaring open between them.

Not this time. This kiss came wrapped in nothing at all.

It was slow, and careful, and achingly gentle—just the two of them standing in a tiny frozen room by a dying blue lamp, holding onto each other as if the mountain were falling away beneath their boots.

The resonance woke between them of its own accord, faint and warm as a hearth fire.

When they finally drew apart, she rested her forehead heavily against his.

"That was the first real one," she whispered against his mouth.

"Yes."

"I’m glad it was this one."

He held her close. They stood tangled together in the middle of the frozen cell for a long, quiet stretch, saying nothing at all, while the rime on the ceiling slowly began to thaw and fall in clear silver drops.

"Thirty days," she murmured at last into his shoulder.

"Then we have thirty days," he said, "to find another way."

"There is no other way."

"There’s always another way. I spent six years at the bottom of a mine, Senior Sister. You learn how to find the side tunnels."

She laughed into the rough cloth of his robe, wet and shaky.

He was about to say something else when her entire body went rigid in his arms.

He felt it through the bond a fraction of a breath before he saw it. A sharp, scalding jolt inside her, sudden as a slap across the face.

Lanying jerked back from him and clutched her left wrist against her chest.

Beneath the white leather bracer, the ruined brand was glowing. Faint red-gold light seeped through the seams in thin, angry rays, pulsing steadily, like a banked coal pulses when someone blows on it from very far away. It didn’t burn her flesh—the fractured seal no longer held the strength to burn across a mountain.

Yet it was awake. And it was pulling.

She stared down at her wrist. Every drop of color had drained from her face, leaving it ash-grey in the dim blue light.

"He’s looking," she whispered. "He’s reaching through the threads. Searching."

"For what?"

She looked up at him, her pale eyes wide with horror.

"For me."

High on Cloudpiercer Peak, in the moon-gate pavilion of the guest residence, Chi Yao opened his eyes.

He had been sitting in meditation since midnight, as he did every single night now, keeping one thin thread of his spiritual sense resting lightly on the Sun Brand. For weeks the mark had lain faint and dull, cracked and quiet, a leash gone slack in the dark. He had told himself it didn’t matter. He had clamped his hand over her wrist on the Cloud Terrace and watched the fire go in. Skin to skin was all he truly needed.

Then, an hour ago, he had felt the faintest tug. A sudden warmth humming along the golden thread, far down the mountain.

Now it was unmistakable.

He followed the pull the way a hunting hound follows blood in the snow. Down from Frost Lotus Peak. Past the quiet eaves of the Scripture Pavilion. Down and down, straight into the Outer Valley. Along the narrow stone row where the senior outer disciples slept.

All the way to the very last door.

Chi Yao sat dead still in the dark pavilion.

His fiancée was down in the Outer Valley, long past midnight, behind the final door on the senior outer disciples’ row.

And he knew precisely who had been given that room.

He rose smoothly to his feet. Fire woke in his open palms, soft and white-gold, casting the carved screens of the pavilion into drifting shadows of cloud and flame.

"Well," Young Master Chi Yao murmured to the empty room. "Let’s go and see."