She slept until the middle of the morning. She had never done that once since she arrived.
Han Jiu knew it was a problem before she even woke up. The grey shadows under her eyes were gone. Her mouth had relaxed in her sleep. She looked like a healthy nineteen-year-old woman. And the last time she had looked even slightly less like she was dying, her uncle had stood in the doorway and mentioned it.
"Don’t say it," she said, without opening her eyes.
"I wasn’t going to."
"You were going to ask what we do about my face." She sat up and pushed her hair back. "Nothing. There’s nothing we can do. I can hold my cultivation down to eight iron bulls in front of anyone who asks. I’ll keep doing that until I die of old age, if I have to. But I can’t hold my face down."
"Then stay inside."
"For sixteen days?"
"For sixteen days."
"And what happens when somebody wonders why the Yun daughter stopped coming out to the well?" She swung her legs off the bed. "The only thing worse than being seen is being hidden. If my uncle wants to look at me, he’ll look at me. But he can’t prove anything just from my face."
Han Bo came at noon, and he didn’t knock.
He came in shoulder first, taking up more of the doorway than he needed to. Two cousins waited outside. Last time, all four of them had crowded in to watch. Han Jiu noticed that, and remembered it.
Han Bo’s right wrist was bare. There was no splint and no bandage. There was only a thin, shiny line across the back of it, where the bone had healed under a medicine that cost more than the ninth branch’s whole stipend.
"Cousin," he said. "You look terrible."
"I’ve been sick."
"So everybody says." He looked around the storeroom, at the swept floor, the folded blanket, and the two cups next to the water jar. His eyes stopped on the cups. "Elder Yun was here."
"He was."
"What did he want?"
"To drink my water and tell me about the letters he writes."
Han Bo laughed at that, which Han Jiu hadn’t expected. He was in a good mood. That worried Han Jiu more than anger would have.
He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his sleeve and held it up, without handing it over.
"The council met this morning. I said I’d bring this down myself. My father wanted to send a servant." He turned the paper over. "It’s the list of candidates for the assessment. Eleven names from this clan. Grandfather signed it an hour ago."
Han Jiu waited.
"You’re not on it."
Han Jiu frowned. "Why not?"
"Because we’re not doing it again." Han Bo unfolded the paper. He wasn’t reading it. He just wanted something to do with his hands. "Three sects, ninth brother. Coldpeak, Ironrain, and Whitegrass, all standing in the same courtyard. Every clan in the Six Valleys sends its best eleven to stand in front of them. And for six years in a row, the Han name has sent up a boy who walks to the stele and shows two bulls."
"Five years."
"Six. You started going when you were fourteen. I was there." He said it patiently. "Do you know what the Coldpeak recorder does now, when he gets to our clan’s names? He puts his brush down and waits. It happens every year, and he’s stopped pretending it doesn’t."
That part was probably true.
"The clan is in trouble," Han Bo said. "Not the way the elders talk about it over dinner. Real trouble. We lost the mines. We lost eleven men on that road. And we married the ninth son to a Yun reject in front of three hundred people." He folded the paper again. "This year, our family is going to walk into that courtyard and look like a real family. Not like a joke with eleven names on it."
"Who took me off the list?"
"My father. Four elders agreed within a minute. Nobody argued."
’Fifteen days of pills and frost and folds,’ Han Jiu thought, ’and it all comes down to a piece of paper in his sleeve.’
"Fine," he said.
Han Bo’s eyebrows went up.
"Fine?"
"Grandfather signed it. What do you want me to say?"
"Something other than ’fine.’ I walked all the way down the hill for this."
"Then you wasted a walk."
Han Bo stopped leaning on the door frame and came properly into the room. Outside, the two cousins moved so they could see in.
"Something’s different about you," he said. "I noticed it the morning I came for your stipend. You were lying there with your face against the wall, and you were smiling. I’ve been thinking about it ever since."
"I’d hit my head."
"Maybe. Show me your cultivation."
’No.’
Han Jiu moved his Qi and let out the same small trickle as always. Two black bulls appeared above his head, small and grey, walking in their circle.
Holding thirty-two bulls down to two while Han Bo stared at him made every muscle in his back lock up.
Han Bo snorted.
"Two. Six years." He shook his head. "Piece of trash."
"Han Bo."
It was Yun Qingshuang. It was the first thing she had said since the door opened.
Han Bo’s whole face changed. He didn’t look scared. He looked hungry.
"Sister-in-law," he said. "I was hoping you’d say something."
He moved his Qi.
Eight iron bulls rose above his head, dark and heavy. The room seemed to get darker, the same way it had the last time. Han Jiu watched Yun Qingshuang keep her hand flat against her leg. He knew how hard that was for her, because she could have shown twice as many.
Then Han Bo moved his right hand.
He didn’t hit anything. He planted his feet, brought his hand up to his shoulder, and turned his palm outward. The Qi in the room shifted.
The eight iron bulls doubled.
Now there were sixteen iron bulls above his head, packed so tightly together that they were almost touching. The frost in the corner of the shutter cracked and fell off in a sheet.
Two hundred and fifty-six.
Han Jiu stood still and did the maths.
That was what a ninth-stage cultivator showed. But Han Bo was only at the eighth stage. So half of that power had to be coming from his hand. And any technique that could double a man’s power wasn’t mortal-rank.
It had to be an Earth-rank spirit technique. Here, in Greypine Valley. In the hand of a twenty-year-old, whose clan had lost its mines six months ago.
"Splitstone Palm," Han Bo said. "Earth-rank."
He kept holding the position. He was enjoying it. He was also burning through his Qi very fast, and he’d feel it in about a minute. Only someone who had never had to pay for his own technique would hold it just to show off.
"Sixteen," he said. "That’s enough to become an inner disciple. That isn’t just scraping in. That’s Coldpeak putting its hand up before the recorder even finishes writing." He looked over at her. "You showed eight at the wedding, sister-in-law."
"I did."
"So take a good look at this. The last time we were in this room, you had my wrist under your boot, and the whole valley heard about it." The bulls turned above him. "Whatever the Yun Clan taught you before they threw you out, it only gave you eight."
She looked at it.
Han Jiu was standing four feet to her left. He could see her face, and there was nothing on it at all.
"It’s very bright," she said.
Han Bo let go of the technique.
The number dropped back to eight in the time it took to breathe. He lowered his hand. His neck turned red, and it wasn’t from the effort.
"Right," he said.
He was at the door before he stopped.
"Eleven names," he said over his shoulder. "You’re not one of them, and you can’t appeal. An appeal needs an elder to argue for you, and the ninth branch doesn’t have one. On the day of the assessment, you’ll stand at the back with the servants and watch."
"I understand."
"I don’t think you do. I think you’re going to try something." He turned around. "You’ve had that look on your face for two weeks. I don’t know what it means, and I don’t care. But I want you to hear me say this out loud, so that afterwards you can’t pretend you didn’t know."
He pointed his healed wrist at him.
"If you come anywhere near that stele, I’ll knock you down in front of all three sects. Not the council. Not Grandfather. Me. And nobody in this family will do anything about it. You already know that, because nobody did anything about it when you were nine."
Then he was gone. The cousins followed him out, and the courtyard went quiet.
Han Jiu put the bar back across the door and leaned against it.
"An Earth-rank technique," he said. "Qingshuang, my clan can barely afford low-grade pills. An Earth-rank technique is something a family locks in its vault. A family might own one, and it never lends it out."
"I know."
"So where does the fifth young master get one, two weeks after someone broke his wrist?"
She had walked over to the shutter. She was looking at the sheet of frost that had fallen off it. It was lying on the floor, slowly melting.
"Say the name again."
"Splitstone Palm."
"It’s a strange name. Stone doesn’t split. It cracks. And every technique I’ve ever heard of is named after the man who created it, or the mountain where he created it." She crouched down and picked up a piece of the ice between two fingers. "The Yun Clan’s second vault holds eleven Earth-rank techniques. I had to learn the whole list when I was ten, because my father thought I’d be in charge of the vault one day."
Han Jiu stopped breathing.
"The fourth one on that list is Splitstone Palm," she said. "It came into our family ninety years ago. Nobody has taken it out of the vault since then, because in three generations, nobody has been worth lending it to."
She stood up and let the ice fall.
"My uncle has bought your cousin."