Han Jiu thought about lying.
Then he looked at Master Lu’s face, and he changed his mind. The alchemist had ridden nine days in six. He had pressed his hand against three rocks on the way up here and read a spirit vein through them. He wasn’t asking a question he didn’t already know the answer to.
"Yes," Han Jiu said. "I’ve been inside."
Master Lu nodded slowly.
"Before you say anything else," Han Jiu said, "I need you to keep quiet about the mines. About what was down there. Nobody in this valley knows, and I want it to stay that way."
"Why should I?"
"Because the shafts are sealed with the Yun Clan’s wax. If anyone finds out what was growing under that ridge, the Yun Clan will tear the mountain open. And they’ll say the Han Clan stole from them, which is how this valley has worked for six months."
"That’s your problem. Not mine."
"It becomes yours," Han Jiu said, "if you want to know what happened to it."
Master Lu looked at him. Then he sat down on a flat rock beside the pool. All of a sudden, he looked very tired.
"All right," he said. "I’ll tell you why I’m here, and then you’ll tell me what you did. Whitegrass has records on this vein going back a hundred years. Sixty years ago, the mountain came down on those shafts and crushed the vein shut. Our elders wrote down what that would do. They said that if the cold stayed trapped long enough, it would gather in one place and grow something. They said sixty years, give or take."
"A flower," said Han Jiu.
"A Frostheart Lotus." Master Lu said the name the way Qingshuang had said it. "Earth-rank. There are four in the whole Western Reaches that anyone knows about, and three of them are locked in sect vaults. I rode nine days in six because I did the maths on sixty years and I didn’t like how close it was." He looked up the track toward the ridge. "And I was one night late."
He turned back to Han Jiu.
"So tell me. Why did you take it? A moss-cutter at the sixth stage doesn’t know what a Frostheart Lotus is. You couldn’t sell it anywhere in the Six Valleys without the Yun Clan hearing. And you’re standing in front of me with nothing in your hands." His voice was calm, but his eyes weren’t. "What did you do with it?"
This was the question Han Jiu had been waiting for.
He couldn’t tell Master Lu the truth. The truth was sitting in a storeroom at the bottom of the hill, in Body Tempering, three years after the whole world had written her off. If Master Lu learned that, he would want to know how. And if he told anyone, Yun Hai would learn it too.
But there was a second truth he could tell.
"I didn’t take it to sell," he said. "I touched it, and something happened to me."
He knelt at the edge of the pool again and picked up one of the bundles of frost moss he had cut. It was still wet and cold from the water.
"Watch."
He closed his hand around the moss and let his body do what it wanted to do.
The cold in the moss came out of it and went into his palm. He felt it go. It was like drinking a cup of cold water, except the cup was his hand. The dark green moss turned pale. Then it turned grey. Then it turned brittle and dry, and when he opened his fingers, it fell apart into dust.
Master Lu stood up.
He didn’t say anything. He took the second bundle of moss off the rock and held it out. Han Jiu took it, and the same thing happened. Green, then pale, then grey, then dust.
"Again," Master Lu said, very quietly.
Han Jiu did it a third time.
Then Master Lu sat back down on the rock. He rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away, he looked older than he had a minute ago.
"Raw cold material," he said. "Absorbed straight through the skin. No furnace, no refining, no loss." He looked at the grey dust on the rock. "Do you know what I would give for a body that does that? Do you know what my whole sect would give? We spend half our lives trying to pull the cold out of ingredients without ruining them. And you just did it by holding a bundle of moss."
"I didn’t know what it was," Han Jiu said. "I still don’t."
That was a lie, and he hoped it didn’t show.
"I do." Master Lu was still looking at the dust. "It’s in our records. Not in the ones they let outer disciples read." He took a breath. "The body doesn’t feel cold. Cold feeds it instead of hurting it. It can take raw cold materials without refining them. And when it tempers itself, the flesh comes out hard and smooth, like jade." He looked up at Han Jiu. "The Frostking Icejade Body. A Heaven-rank innate physique. The last person our records mention who had one died three hundred years ago."
Han Jiu kept his face still. It was the name the system had given him, word for word.
"And the lotus woke it up," Master Lu said. "That’s what you’re telling me. You touched an Earth-rank treasure that had been growing in a cold vein for sixty years, with a physique asleep inside you, and it woke up."
"That’s what I’m telling you."
"And your hands." Master Lu looked at them again. "They didn’t heal, did they? They were rebuilt."
Han Jiu said nothing. That was an answer too.
Master Lu laughed. It was short, and it didn’t sound happy.
"I rode nine days in six to find a flower," he said. "I found a boy who ate it."
"Will you keep quiet about the mines?"
"About the mines? Yes." Master Lu stood up and brushed off his coat. "About you? Much more than that. If Coldpeak finds out what you are, they’ll take you before I can open my mouth. If Ironrain finds out, they’ll fight Coldpeak for you. And if anybody in this valley finds out, somebody will try to cut you open and see how it works." He shouldered his bag. "So nobody finds out. On the day of the assessment, you’ll stand at that stele and show whatever small number you like, and Whitegrass will pick you, and everyone will think I’ve gone soft in the head."
"I’m not on the list," said Han Jiu. "My clan took my name off."
"Then I’ll put it back. A sect can call anyone forward. Your clan doesn’t get a say in who Whitegrass wants." Master Lu started toward the track. "Anything else?"
"One thing."
Master Lu stopped.
"My wife comes with me."
Master Lu turned around slowly.
"Your wife," he said. "The Yun girl. The one they sent up here on a supply cart."
"Yes."
"Whitegrass takes disciples. We don’t take wives. We don’t feed them, we don’t house them, and we don’t pay for them." He looked at Han Jiu. "And from what I’ve heard, she’s a very expensive girl to feed."
"Then I’ll feed her," said Han Jiu. "You won’t have to spend a single stone on her. But where I go, she goes. If she doesn’t come, I don’t come."
Master Lu studied him. Han Jiu didn’t look away.
"You’d give up a Heaven-rank physique’s place at my sect," Master Lu said, "for a Yun reject who’s going backwards."
"She’s my wife."
Master Lu let out a breath through his nose. It was almost a laugh.
"Fine," he said. "She comes. But her clan is your problem, not mine. I’m an alchemist. I don’t fight clan elders over their daughters."
He walked off down the track without waiting for an answer.
...
"He named it," Han Jiu said.
He was sitting on the floor of the storeroom with his back against the wall. Yun Qingshuang was sitting on the bed across from him with her sword on her knees. He had told her everything, from the vein to the moss to the name.
"And he’ll keep quiet?"
"He has every reason to. If anyone else learns about me, Whitegrass loses me."
"And the mines?"
"Nobody hears about the flower. And nobody hears about you." He looked at her. "As far as he knows, the lotus went into me. You’re still the Yun girl who’s going backwards."
She was quiet. Then she said, "And the last part?"
He had been waiting to say it.
"I told him my wife comes with me. To Whitegrass." He kept his voice even. "He agreed. But I didn’t ask you first. So I’m asking you now."
Yun Qingshuang looked down at her sword.
"When I came here," she said, "I thought this was the last place I’d ever live. I thought I’d die in this room. My uncle thought so too. That’s why he sent me." She ran her thumb along the scabbard. "I don’t owe the Yun Clan anything. They stopped being my family the day my parents didn’t come home."
She looked up at him.
"I’m not going to Whitegrass as a Yun daughter," she said. "I’m going as your wife."
Something in Han Jiu’s chest went tight. He nodded, because he didn’t trust himself to say anything.
"But there’s a problem," she said.
"What problem?"
"A married daughter is still written in her clan’s records. She can’t leave the valley unless the head of her clan signs her out." She said it flatly, like reading out a rule. "And the head of my clan is my uncle."
She set the sword down beside her.
"He’ll never sign it, Han Jiu. Not while I’m alive. The only way I leave this valley on his paper is dead."