He didn’t remember the last part of the walk.
He remembered the three stones going into his body on the track, and the cold pushing back against them, the way a river pushes against a man’s legs.
He remembered getting up. He remembered thinking that the storeroom was very close, and being wrong about that by a long way.
After that, there was nothing, until he woke up on the storeroom floor. His head was resting on a folded blanket, and both of his hands were wrapped in red silk.
Han Jiu looked at the red silk and understood what it was.
She had cut up her wedding dress.
"You were unconscious for six hours," said Yun Qingshuang.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed frame. She was close enough to touch him. She had never sat that close to him before. Her sword was on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall by the door.
"How did I get here?"
"I carried you."
"From where?"
"From the bottom of the north track, about three hundred steps past the last pine trees." Her voice was completely flat. "You’d been lying face down in the frost for so long that there was ice in your hair. Ten more minutes, and I would have been carrying a dead man down a hill. And then I’d have had to explain to my uncle what I was doing on that hill in the first place."
"You went looking for me."
"You said you’d be gone four hours. You were gone longer. I had to."
Han Jiu tried to sit up. Every part of his body hurt, so he gave up and just turned his head.
Even that small effort made his eyes water with pain.
"Thank you," he said anyway, and he meant it. If she hadn’t come looking for him, he would have died.
"Don’t." She said it quickly. "Don’t do that. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to shout at you. And if you thank me while I’m still deciding, I will definitely shout."
"All right."
"Your hands are ruined." She nodded at them. "Not forever. But the skin came off both of your palms in whole sheets. You won’t be able to close your hands properly for at least two weeks. You won’t be cutting moss this month. You won’t be lifting anything. You won’t be doing anything with your hands at all, except keeping them clean and letting them hurt."
He let that sink in.
Two weeks. And he had twenty-eight days left.
"Was it worth it?" she asked.
Han Jiu smiled. It hurt his face, but he did it anyway.
"Look inside my shirt," he said.
She had already looked inside his shirt, of course. She had carried him down a mountain.
But she hadn’t taken anything out. Now she reached over and pulled out the six pieces of frostmarrow, one at a time, and laid them on the floor in a row.
Then she sat and looked at them.
"Six," she said at last.
"Six."
"You went into a crushed cold vein at the third stage, with a candle and a knife, and you came out with six pieces of frostmarrow."
"Yes."
"Do you understand what these are?" She wasn’t shouting. Her voice had gone very quiet instead. "Just one of these is worth a whole year of your branch’s stipend."
"I know."
"No, you don’t. You can’t possibly know. If you really knew, you wouldn’t have gone down there to get them. Nobody who understood what six pieces of frostmarrow are worth would risk their life for them. Because six pieces of frostmarrow aren’t worth a life."
"They are if the life is mine," said Han Jiu. ’They are.’
Yun Qingshuang stopped.
He watched her decide not to argue with that.
"Take them," he said.
"What?"
"Take them. All six. That’s what they’re for."
She didn’t move.
"No," she said.
"Qingshuang—"
"No. Listen to me." She turned to face him properly. There was something in her face that he hadn’t seen in the two days he had known her. It took him a moment to realise it was fear. "You have twenty-eight days to show forty bulls at the stele, for one of the three sects. If you sold these six pieces carefully, in the right town, to someone who doesn’t ask questions, you’d get a hundred stones. Maybe more. That’s enough for your fourth stage and most of your fifth."
She picked up one of the pieces and held it out to him on her palm. Her hand was steady now.
"I’m a bottomless hole. You know that. You knew it before I even got here. If you put a hundred stones into me, three weeks later there’ll be nothing left to show for it. If you put a hundred stones into yourself, there’ll be a man standing at that stele with a future."
"You’d be dead by spring," he argued.
"Yes."
She said it the way she said everything. Flatly, like it was a fact that had been decided a long time ago, by people who knew more than either of them.
Han Jiu lay on the storeroom floor with his ruined hands on his chest. He thought about how much he hated the Coldpeak Sect’s assessor. He had never met the man. But he hated him for sitting down with those numbers and being so kind about it.
"Put it down," he said. "I can’t take it. I can’t close my hands."
"Han Jiu—"
"Put it down, pick up all six, and use them. If you don’t, I’ll roll over on top of them, and I won’t stop until I die, and then neither of us will get anything." He looked her in the eye. "I’m not trying to be noble. I want you to understand that. I have a reason for this, and it’s a selfish reason, and I can’t tell you what it is yet. Just know that I went down there to get these for you. Not for me."
Yun Qingshuang stared at him. She didn’t know what to say.
"...I’m going to roll over on them."
Yun Qingshuang bit her lip. She was clearly frustrated. But there was something else in her face too, something softer.
Then she gathered the six pieces of frostmarrow off the floor and closed her hand around them. And for Han Jiu, the world chimed.
[Genuine Investment Detected.]
The candle by the wall stopped flickering.
[Target: Yun Qingshuang.]
[Investment: 6 × frostmarrow, unrefined.]
[Cost classification: extreme, near death.]
[Base return: ten-fold. Cost bonus: ninety-fold.]
[Total return: one hundred-fold.]
[Rebate issued: 600 × frostmarrow, unrefined. Deposited to Rebate Inventory.]
Han Jiu lay very still on the floor and stared up at the ceiling.
Six hundred.
The inventory at the back of his head was full of pale, wet-looking stones, floating slowly in the cold grey space. There were six hundred of them. If his hands had worked, he thought he might have punched a hole in the wall.
Then the candle flame started flickering again. Yun Qingshuang opened her hand and looked down at the six pieces in her palm. She hadn’t noticed anything at all.
She sighed, glanced at him, and then closed her eyes to meditate.
’Six hundred,’ Han Jiu thought.
He did the maths while she was still deciding whether to be angry with him.
One piece was worth a year of the ninth branch’s stipend. That was about twelve stones, if you measured it that way, and that was the only way he knew how to measure it.
So six hundred pieces were worth about seven thousand spirit stones.
He only needed three thousand.
He had gone down a hole with a candle and a knife, and he had come back with more than twice what he needed. And it had only taken him one night.
Then he realised something, and all his happiness drained away.
He couldn’t sell them.
There was only one place in the Six Valleys where frostmarrow came from. It was four sealed mine shafts on Han land, with a Yun Clan wax seal on every one. Nobody had opened a cold vein in sixty years. Everybody knew that.
So if Han Jiu walked into an alchemy shop with even one piece of frostmarrow in his hand, the shopkeeper would look at the stone. Then he would look at the poor ninth son of a broken branch, standing there with ten years’ worth of the valley’s treasure on his counter. And then the shopkeeper would go and tell somebody.
And in the ancestral hall, Elder Yun Hai would put down his tea.
’Seven thousand stones,’ Han Jiu thought. ’And I can’t spend a single one. I can’t sell them. I can’t show them to anybody. I can’t even carry one out of this room in the daytime.’
He started laughing, and then he stopped right away.
Pain shot through his ribs and his hands and somewhere behind his eyes. It didn’t let go of him for almost a minute.
"You’ve gone mad," Yun Qingshuang said.
"Probably."
"You’re lying on the floor of a storeroom, with no hands, laughing."
"Yes."
"Can you explain any of it?"
"No," said Han Jiu, wiping his face on his shoulder. "But it really is funny. You’ll just have to trust me."
’It looks like I’ll have to go somewhere far away to sell this frostmarrow.’
But then, suddenly, the cold voice came back. And it said something it had never said before.
[Rebate may be issued in a different form. Conversion available: 20 × frostmarrow → 1 × Qi Condensing Pill, mid grade.]
[Specify the split.]
Han Jiu blinked.
His heart was pounding. He read it again, and then a third time. Then he understood what he was being offered.