The tea was his.
Han Jiu saw it from the doorway. His water jar was open against the wall. His father’s old tin cup was in Elder Yun Hai’s hand. A second cup sat on the floor, and nobody had touched it.
He bowed as low as he was required to. It let him look at the floor for a second, which helped.
’Don’t circulate. Whatever he says, show nothing.’
Han Jiu couldn’t let anyone ruin his only chance.
"Sit," said Yun Hai.
There was nowhere to sit except the floor. So Han Jiu sat on the floor and rested his bandaged hands in his lap.
Yun Qingshuang was standing against the far wall. Her sword was leaning by the door, where she left it every night. It was only three steps away from her, but she hadn’t moved toward it. She had decided not to, before he even got there.
"You walk a lot," Yun Hai said. "What do you do up there?"
"There isn’t much else to do, Elder Yun."
"No. I suppose there isn’t." He had old ink stains on the first two fingers of his right hand. "My men are bored. Do you know what bored men do in someone else’s home? They watch the door, because nothing else is happening." He drank. "Twice in eleven days, you went up the north track before sunrise and came back after dark. Both times, you came back with nothing in your hands."
"I went to the frost pools."
"Yes. You did."
Han Jiu realised he had already made a mistake. The old man had known the answer before he asked. He had only asked to see how Han Jiu would answer.
"My stipend was taken away," Han Jiu said. "Moss sells for two coppers a bundle, and my rope is still in the shed. I’m not allowed to ask my grandfather for anything. Where else would I go?"
"Where else, indeed." Yun Hai put the cup down on the floor very carefully. "The north track only goes to two places. The frost pools. And four sealed mine shafts."
"I know that."
"Show me your hands."
Han Jiu held them out. They were still wrapped up to the wrists in red silk. He had stopped thinking about what the silk was after the third day. Now, in the lamplight, in front of the man whose clan had paid for that wedding robe, he noticed it again.
Yun Hai looked at the bandages. He didn’t say anything about them.
"Take one off."
Han Jiu used his teeth to untie the knot and unwrapped his left hand. The palm underneath had turned from white to a raw, wet pink. The new skin was so thin that he could almost see through it.
Yun Hai leaned in to look, but didn’t touch.
"I have been visiting valleys like this one for forty years," he said. "I know what cold water does to a man who cuts moss. It ruins the fingertips first. Then the nails come loose, then the knuckles stop bending. The palm goes last, and it turns grey." He sat back. "Your fingers are fine. But the skin came off your palms in whole sheets."
"I fell into the second pool. I reached for a rock with good moss on it and slipped in up to my shoulder. My hands were under the water longer than the rest of me."
It wasn’t a good lie. But it was the only story that matched the injury. He had practised it for eleven days, and he’d said it to himself twice on the walk down that evening.
"Mm," Yun Hai said, and nodded.
Then he reached into his sleeve with two fingers, took out a round piece of red wax as big as his palm, and set it on the floor between them.
The wax was new. The Yun Clan’s seal was pressed into it clearly, and the surface was still shiny, because it hadn’t fully hardened yet.
Han Jiu’s Qi stirred.
It was a tiny thing. His body did it by itself, the way a body flinches when it gets scared. But he was at sixth stage now. If that Qi got out, two iron bulls would appear over his head.
He forced it back down. His jaw hurt from how hard he clenched it.
Nothing appeared above his head.
"I have four more of these in my sleeve," Yun Hai said. "They were made from the Yun Clan’s master seal. We keep that seal, because the Yun Clan owns every mine in this valley." He watched Han Jiu’s face. "I don’t need to find a broken seal. If I say someone opened the northernmost shaft, then someone opened it. There will be fresh wax on the boards to prove it. Your grandfather will look at it, and he’ll only be able to come to one conclusion."
"Then why haven’t you done it?"
"Because I don’t need to yet." Yun Hai picked the wax up off the floor and slid it back into his sleeve. Then he picked up the cup again. "And because I don’t like wasting things. Your clan is going to fall apart in the next two years without any help from me. It would be foolish to use up a lie now, when I might need it later."
He turned the cup slowly in his hand and looked around the room.
"How is she eating?" he asked.
"Ask her."
"I’m asking her husband. Feeding her is the husband’s job."
"She eats what I eat."
"Which is nothing, since the council took away your stipend." Yun Hai nodded, as if that answered a small question on a list. "You think I enjoy this, don’t you?"
"I haven’t thought about it."
"Yes, you have. You’ve thought about it every day since the wedding." He put the cup down again. "Let me save you some time. You’ll spend the next two weeks imagining what kind of man I am, so you may as well know the truth. I was the one who wrote the recommendation. Not the sect. The sect sent us their report on her, and my family had to decide what to do. I read the report, and I wrote three pages advising the family to stop supporting her."
Yun Qingshuang didn’t move at all.
"Would you like to know what I wrote in those three pages?"
"No," said Han Jiu.
"No one ever does." Yun Hai kept talking anyway, in the same calm voice, like a man reading out a list of grain prices. "A Frost-Devouring root is the best spirit root anyone in my family has been born with in six generations. It takes in five times as much as yours does. It can absorb raw spirit materials straight from the hand, and no ordinary cultivator on this mountain can do that. If you fed it properly for twenty years, she could drink from a spirit vein faster than the vein could refill. Everybody knows this. I knew it when she was eight years old."
"Then—"
"A hundred and fifty thousand stones. That was how much it would cost to raise her to Foundation realm. Only that far." Yun Hai held up one ink-stained finger. "It wasn’t because she was weak. It was because she was expensive. The same money could raise five other people to Foundation realm instead. And five is more than one."
"You don’t know she would have failed."
"No, I don’t. That’s exactly the problem." He looked a little pleased that Han Jiu had worked that out. "If I could be sure she would survive every danger, the money would be worth it. I would have fought for it. But cultivators die. They die in their first year, doing simple jobs, in bad weather. If you spend a hundred and fifty thousand stones on five disciples, you can lose two of them and still have three. If you spend it all on one girl, one bad week in a forest can lose you everything. And then I’m the one who has to explain to my family why the vault is empty."
He turned the cup again.
"I was not wrong," he said. "That’s the part people find hard to accept. If you showed me the same report tomorrow, I would write the same three pages. And I would be right again."
Nobody spoke.
Han Jiu looked at the man sitting on his only stool, and he realised, without any pleasure at all, that Yun Hai believed every word. There was no cruelty in it. He had decided his own niece’s worth the way a farmer decides what a horse is worth, even a horse he likes. Then he had sent his decision up to the family, and gone to sleep that night without any trouble.
"So how long does she have?" Yun Hai counted it out calmly. "Fifth stage by winter. Third stage by spring. After that, it isn’t her cultivation that gets eaten any more. It’s her body. That usually takes one more season. So, summer. Maybe autumn, if she’s stubborn. And she will be, because she’s always been stubborn about things that don’t help her."
"She isn’t going to be fifth stage by winter."
The room went silent.
’Idiot.’
The moment the words left his mouth, he knew how dangerous they were. All he could do was keep his hands still, keep his eyes still, and keep everything inside him perfectly calm.
Yun Hai stopped turning the cup.
"No?" he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
Behind him, he heard cloth rub against cloth. Her hand had gone to the sword. In about two seconds, she was going to do something that would get them both killed.
So Han Jiu laughed.
It came out too high and too loud. It sounded close to crying. That was easy, because his hands hurt and his heart was pounding.
"No reason, Elder Yun. None at all." He wiped his face on his shoulder. "I’m nineteen. I show two bulls. My wife has to break people’s wrists for me because I can’t do it myself. I used to get twelve stones a year, and now I don’t even get that. And then a man like you sits in my room and tells me which season my wife is going to die in. What am I supposed to say? ’Thank you, sir’? ’Yes, sir, autumn, I’ll remember that’?"
He kept going for a little too long, because that was the whole point. He needed to look pathetic.
"So I said no. That’s all. Saying no is the only thing I have left."
The sound of cloth behind him stopped.
Yun Hai watched the whole thing the way a man watches a dog barking at a wall. When Han Jiu was done, Yun Hai finished his tea, stood up, and put the tin cup down next to the water jar.
"The assessment is at the end of the month," he said. "I expect you’ll stand at the stele with everyone else. Your grandfather will want people to see the family putting someone forward."
"I expect I will."
"Good." Yun Hai walked to the door. He stopped there and turned around, but he didn’t look at Han Jiu.
"Your face looks better, niece."
Yun Qingshuang said nothing.
"It does," Yun Hai said, to nobody in particular. "It must be the mountain air. Your mother always said Greypine had good air."
Then he walked out. The two men waiting in the courtyard followed him, and the sound of their boots faded away across the stones.
Han Jiu got up, pushed the door shut with his shoulder, and put the wooden bar across it. The bar was only a thin piece of pine. It wouldn’t have stopped a child.
"He’s noticed," Yun Qingshuang said.
"He’s noticed something. He doesn’t know what."
"He was in this room for ten minutes, and he worked out that I’ve stopped dying. He’s only looked at me four times in three years, and he still noticed." She covered her eyes with her hand. "My uncle is not stupid. He’s never been stupid. And you told him. Out loud. Then you had to act like a child in front of him so he’d forget what you said."
"It worked."
"I know it worked."
She took her hand away from her eyes. Han Jiu decided they were done talking about it for tonight. He hoped they’d never have to talk about it again.
He picked his father’s cup up off the floor. There was a little cold tea left in the bottom. He poured it out of the window.
"That wax seal... Does he want to frame me, so he can complain to the Coldpeak Sect?" Han Jiu asked, even though he already knew the answer.
"That’s the kind of man he is." Yun Qingshuang nodded. "If my father and mother were still alive, he would never have been able to take control of the clan. The clan would still be supporting me, instead of his son."
Something moved in her eyes, but then they went cold again.
Han Jiu sighed. "I’m sorry, but can I ask what happened to your parents?"
Yun Qingshuang glanced at him. Then she looked down.
"They went on a clan mission right after the sect’s report about me arrived. They went mostly for my sake. They wanted to find an ice-attribute resource to help my cultivation."
"But they died, and nobody knows how."
She looked up at him. For the first time, Han Jiu saw rage in her eyes.
She glanced at the door, to make sure no one was there. Then she looked back at him.
"And I strongly believe that bastard Yun Hai was the one who killed them."
Han Jiu’s eyes went wide.
"Right after the report came," he said. "Not before. After."
"After." Her voice was flat and empty. "The sect’s report told the whole family how much I cost. And then the only two people who were ever going to pay for me went out on a mountain road and never came back."
’Fuck. What a stinking bastard.’ A chill ran down Han Jiu’s back. ’Yun Hai is a monster.’
"He isn’t just waiting for me to die," she said. "He’s waiting for me to die here. In a Han house, on Han land, married to a Han husband."
Her hands curled into fists.
"Then he can say a Yun daughter died in this valley, and that the Han Clan owes the Yun Clan for it. That’s what I’ve been for ever since my parents died. That’s the only reason he’s kept me alive."
"Qingshuang—"
"Let’s start."
She looked at Han Jiu with a cold, hard look on her face.
"Start what?" Han Jiu blinked.
"Using the insight I found. The one that completes the Deepwinter Canon."
Han Jiu sat up so fast that his hands screamed in pain.
"So you’re finally ready? It took you ten days."
"I wanted to be sure, so I kept doing calculations and tests. Now I can go up a stage, and I can teach you too."
"Great."