Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Chapter 6

Yan Shuo lay very still and looked at the ceiling.

The squares of sunlight had crept a finger’s width across the wood while he slept. Somewhere outside, a bird was singing, and a pestle was grinding in a mortar. The whole valley smelled of medicine and spring. It was a beautiful morning. He would have liked very much to be anywhere else.

’Lie,’ Qin Wuyue said in his head. Her voice was flat and certain. ’Tell her you were born that way. Tell her an outer-sect healer botched a treatment when you were small. Tell her anything.’

’She’s seen the technique before.’

’All the more reason. You don’t know this girl. You don’t know who she reports to.’

Bai Rou waited with her hands folded on her tray of needles. She didn’t hurry him and waited patiently.

Yan Shuo had spent six years trusting nobody and it had kept him alive. The lie was ready on his tongue.

He said, "My mother." Atleast, even if she reports him, it would be the most believable thing.

Qin hissed something in an archaic dialect he was fairly sure was a curse.

Bai Rou’s expression didn’t change, but something in her eyes softened. "Is she..."

"She died when I was thirteen." That part, at least, was what the sect had told him. He’d believed it for six years. "She never explained why."

Bai Rou was quiet for a moment. She picked up a needle, turned it in the light, and set it down again—a habit of her that he was beginning to recognize.

"Then she loved you very much," she said at last. "A seal like that has a price. The one who casts it pours some of their own life into each lock. Eleven locks." She shook her head slowly. "I can’t imagine what that cost her."

Yan Shuo’s throat closed. He looked back at the ceiling until it opened again.

"You said you’d seen it once before," he managed.

"When I was small." Bai Rou’s voice went carefully. "It doesn’t matter where. What matters is that I know what it means when someone hides a child’s meridians that thoroughly." She met his eyes. "It means someone very powerful was looking for that child."

The bird outside kept singing.

"Are you going to report me?" Yan Shuo asked.

Bai Rou reached under her tray and drew out a sheet of paper covered in neat, small characters. She held it up so he could read it.

Service disciple Yan Shuo. Three cracked ribs, fractured left index finger, bruising throughout, internal bleeding (moderate). Old meridian damage consistent with a failed foundation in childhood. Treated with two marrow pills and needlework. Prognosis: full recovery in ten days.

"That’s what the Medicine Valley records will say," she said. "A man from the Law Hall came by an hour after your friend carried you in. He wanted to examine you personally. I told him you had a fever and might be contagious. He left very quickly."

Yan Shuo stared at her.

"Why?"

"Physicians keep their patients’ secrets." She tucked the paper away. "And I don’t like the Law Hall."

There was more behind that, a whole room’s worth of more. He could see her deciding not to open the door.

’Well,’ Qin said grudgingly, after a long pause. ’Either that girl is the best liar I’ve met in my entire life, or she’s exactly what she looks like.’

’Which do you think?’

’I think you got lucky, brat. And I think you should stop testing how lucky you are.’

Bai Rou examined his hand while he lay there, unwrapping the splint on his finger and probing the swelling with cool fingertips. Then she placed two of those fingertips on his wrist, much the way Elder Gu had, and closed her eyes.

Her qi came in gently. Her qi, light and warm, moving through his single open meridian like a hand smoothing out a wrinkled sheet.

She stopped halfway along the channel. Her brows drew together.

"That’s strange."

Yan Shuo kept his breathing perfectly even.

"There’s residue in your channel." She opened her eyes and looked at him with bright, focused expression. "Earth qi. Heavy and old, like the qi in a spirit vein. A human meridian should never be able to carry vein qi raw. It would scorch the channel like lamp oil poured down a reed." She pressed a little harder. "Yours is scarred, but the scars are old. There’s no new burning at all."

"I work in the mines," Yan Shuo said. "Maybe I breathed some in."

"Maybe." She clearly didn’t believe it for a second. "Your friend says the senior brother who beat you is walking around with a broken wrist. Apparently, he slipped on the track."

"Clumsy of him."

"Very." The corner of her mouth twitched. Then, very softly, she added, "Whatever you did down there, don’t do it again until those ribs heal. I’d hate to lose such an interesting patient."

The door banged open.

"Brother!"

Ruan Tie filled the doorway. His face was streaked with dried tears and mine dust, his hair was full of straw from wherever he’d slept in the courtyard, and he crossed the room in two strides with his arms flung wide.

"Ribs," Bai Rou said sharply.

Ruan Tie froze mid-lunge, arms still outstretched. He lowered himself to his knees beside the cot with enormous care, like a bear trying to sit down in a teahouse, settling instead for gripping Yan Shuo’s good hand in both of his.

"I thought you were dead," he said thickly. "I came around the bend and you were on the track and there was so much blood, and that lantern was nearly out, and I thought..." His face crumpled.

"I’m fine."

"You’re not fine! You look like a dropped melon."

"Thank you, brother."

"Zhao Kun did this." Ruan Tie’s grip tightened until Yan Shuo’s knuckles creaked. "I saw his grey robe going up the lift. I’ll find him. I’ll break his wrists. I’ll break both his legs and feed them to the mine rats."

"You’ll do nothing of the kind," Bai Rou cut in, "because if you get thrown out of the sect, who’s going to carry him up nine levels next time?"

Ruan Tie opened his mouth then closed it. He looked at Yan Shuo with deep betrayal, as if to ask whether this terrifying woman was allowed to be right.

Yan Shuo laughed, which hurt his ribs, which made him laugh harder, which hurt more.

It was the first time in six years that two people had sat beside his bed.

The temperature dropped. It happened all at once. The warm spring air in the room simply turned crisp, then biting cold, and a delicate fur of frost spread across the glazed medicine jars lined along the shelves. Bai Rou’s breath came out in a faint white cloud.

Ruan Tie twisted around on his knees and stared at the doorway.

Someone was standing in the courtyard outside the paper screen. A tall, straight silhouette, motionless as a sword in a rack.

"Physician Bai." The voice was cool, clear, and carried perfectly. "Elder Shen sent me for the Ice-Heart Stabilizing Pills she ordered. Are they ready?"

Yan Shuo knew that voice. In fact half the sect knew that voice.

Ruan Tie’s jaw dropped open so wide Yan Shuo could have fitted an ore basket in it.

Bai Rou rose, set her tray aside, and slid the screen open without any visible hurry.

Su Lanying stood on the threshold, framed in morning light. Pale blue robes, silver-white hair bound high with a single pin of carved ice. The Frost Lotus Fairy of the Azure Cloud Sect, here at a service disciple’s sickbed in Medicine Valley, holding an empty pill bottle in one slender hand.

She looked tired. That was the first thing Yan Shuo noticed. There were faint shadows under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept, and the frost spilling off her was restless. It flickered in and out along the doorframe like breath on a winter window.

Her qi was unsettled. Something inside her had shifted three nights ago, and she was still trying to hold it in place.

He knew exactly how that felt.

"The pills are drying," Bai Rou said, perfectly unbothered. "A quarter of an hour."

"I’ll wait." Lanying started to turn toward the bench in the courtyard.

Her gaze passed across the room on the way. Past the frosted jars. Past Ruan Tie, kneeling on the floor with his mouth still open. To the cot.

To Yan Shuo.

She stopped.

The frost on the doorframe stopped flickering and went perfectly, crystallinely still. For a long moment, she simply looked at him—at the bruises and the splinted finger and the bandages—and he watched recognition settle in her face, followed instantly by something much sharper.

"You," she said.

Ruan Tie looked from her to Yan Shuo and back again with the expression of a man watching a dog start reciting poetry.

Lanying stepped into the room. The temperature fell another notch. Every medicine jar on the shelves rang faintly as the cold bit into the glaze.

"Physician Bai," she said, never looking away from Yan Shuo. "I’d like a word with your patient. Alone."

"My patient has his ribs cracked," Bai Rou said mildly. "If you freeze him, I’ll have to start over."

"I won’t freeze him."

Bai Rou glanced at Yan Shuo. He gave the smallest nod.

"Five minutes," Bai Rou said. She took Ruan Tie by the back of his collar—which was a little like a sparrow taking hold of an ox—and steered him out into the courtyard. Ruan Tie went, looking back over his shoulder the whole way.

The screen slid shut.

The room was silent except for the faint, high singing of the frosted jars.

Lanying stood at the foot of the cot, very straight, very composed. Her hands were clasped in front of her, knuckles white.

"For three years," she said quietly, "I have been stuck at the exact same bottleneck. I tried every pill the sect could buy. I meditated in the coldest cave on Frost Lotus Peak for a hundred days. Nothing happened."

She took one step closer.

"Then a service disciple poured my wine. I touched his wrist, and it cracked."

Her pale blue eyes fixed on his, sharp enough to draw blood.

"So," she whispered, her voice carrying no anger, only a terrifying, desperate focus. "Tell me exactly what you did to me at that banquet."