He slept until the middle of the afternoon. When he woke up, she was sitting in exactly the same place. He could tell she had spent the whole time working out how to say something.
"Sit up," she said. "Slowly. Don’t use your hands."
He pushed himself back against the wall, one small movement at a time.
"Just say it," he said. "You’ve been getting ready to say it since this morning."
"You need eight more bulls than you’re ever going to have," said Yun Qingshuang. "You told me last night that you can reach the sixth stage. The sixth stage is thirty-two bulls. The number you need is forty. You can’t get to forty by cultivating, because the seventh stage costs as much as all the stages below it put together. You don’t have that much, and you don’t have enough days."
"I’d already worked that out."
"So you stop trying to make the number bigger. Instead, you make the thing that multiplies it bigger." She said it calmly, like she had practised it. "A better cultivation method doubles everything you show. The sixth stage with an Earth-rank method is sixty-four."
"The Han Clan owns one cultivation method," Han Jiu said. "It’s mortal-rank, it’s four hundred years old, and every outer disciple in this house learns it when they’re nine. There isn’t a single Earth-rank method in Greypine Valley."
"There’s one."
"Where?"
Yun Qingshuang tapped the side of her head with two fingers.
Han Jiu forgot all about his hands.
"They took the jade slip back," she said. "On the day they stopped paying for me, an elder came to my room and held out his hand. I put the jade slip in it. He wrote in his book that Coldpeak’s property had been returned, safe and whole. That was all they could do."
"Because you had already learned it."
"I had half-mastered it by the time I was sixteen. It’s been in my head every day since then, and I’ve practised it every day since then. It’s the only thing I own that they didn’t think to take from me." She pressed her hands flat on her knees. "It’s called the Deepwinter Canon. It’s Earth-rank, and it’s cold-attribute. That’s why they gave it to me. And that’s why it’ll suit a man who’s spent four years with his arms in a frost pool."
"You want to teach it to me."
"Yes."
"That’s your idea."
"That’s my idea."
Han Jiu leaned his head back against the wall and started thinking of all the ways he was going to say no.
"What happens to you?" he asked.
"That isn’t the question that matters."
"It’s the only question that matters. What happens to you?"
She told him, in the flat voice she used for numbers.
"The sects call it Transmission. It means teaching a sect’s art to someone outside the sect. They treat it the same as stealing a sect’s treasure. So the punishment isn’t a fine, and it isn’t being thrown out."
"Say it."
"They destroy your meridians, and they leave you alive." Her thumbnail found a loose thread on the blanket and picked at it. "I watched them do it once, when I was fourteen. An outer disciple had taught his little brother a mortal-rank sword form, because the boy couldn’t afford to pay to join the sect. Just a mortal-rank sword form. They did it in the main yard so that all of us would see. Then they sent him home to his village. He lived for another nine years like that."
"And you want to give me an Earth-rank method."
"Yes."
"Even though I’m an outsider."
"Yes."
"Then no," said Han Jiu.
"You don’t get to say no."
"I’m saying it anyway."
"Why?" For the first time since she had walked through the gate in her red dress, she raised her voice. "You went down a sealed mine shaft with a candle. You lay in the frost for six hours. You gave me six pieces of frostmarrow, told me you were doing it for a selfish reason, and then refused to tell me what the reason was. You don’t get to spend two days making your own life cheap for my sake, and then decide that my life is the one that’s too expensive to risk."
"That’s not the same thing."
"It’s exactly the same thing, and you know it is. That’s why your face has gone red."
"They cut you off." His voice was getting louder, and he let it. "They took your pills, and your stones, and your jade slip, and they wrote it all down in a book as if it was nothing. They stopped being your sect two years ago. And you’re still following their rules, waiting for them to punish you by breaking meridians they wouldn’t even pay to build."
"Yes," said Yun Qingshuang.
"Why?"
"Because the rules didn’t stop when the money did. Nobody understands that until it happens to them." She said it the same way she said everything else. "I’m not a disciple anymore. I don’t get an allowance, I don’t have a teacher, and I don’t have a bed in that mountain. But I swore an oath when I was eight years old, with my father’s hand on my shoulder. The oath isn’t the same thing as the money. And nobody has ever offered to take the oath back."
The candle had gone out. Neither of them had noticed. The light coming through the shutters had turned the dull grey of a winter afternoon.
"There’s a way you’d agree to," Han Jiu said.
"There isn’t."
"There is. Teach me a mortal-rank method instead. Something ordinary. Something anybody in the valley could have taught me. Then, if anyone finds out, it won’t matter much."
"A mortal-rank method doesn’t double anything. That’s what mortal-rank means." She looked at him. "You’d stand at that stele with thirty-two bulls and slightly better breathing. You’d still fail. And I’d have taken the risk for nothing. That’s the only thing I won’t accept."
"Then wait a year."
"You have twenty-eight days. After that, my uncle writes a letter, and then we stop talking about cultivation and start talking about survival." The corner of her mouth moved a tiny bit. "Besides, sooner or later, somebody is going to have to give you something. You’ve been very busy being the one who gives. I want to see how you handle being on the other side. I don’t think you’re going to be good at it."
Han Jiu opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.
"You’re doing it right now," she said. "You’re trying to find a way to owe me less."
He knew he had already lost. So he tried to at least lose less.
"Conditions," he said.
"No."
"Two conditions."
"You’re lying on the floor. You can’t close your hands. You have nothing to bargain with." She sighed. "What are they?"
"First, you only teach me how to move the Qi. Nothing else. Not the name. Not the opening words. Not whatever the sect writes at the top of the jade slip so everyone knows it’s theirs. Just the shape of it." He looked her in the eye. "If somebody senses it inside me, they should think it’s a method they’ve never heard of. Not a Coldpeak one."
Her eyebrows went up.
"That’s a real condition," she said. "That would actually work. Most people can’t tell one Earth-rank method from another. Only an elder could name it, and only if he had practised it himself."
"Good."
"And the second condition?"
"If anything goes wrong, you never taught me anything. I found a jade slip down in the mine, and I’ve been lying about it since the very first night." He shrugged, and it hurt. "Everybody already believes I’ve been lying since the first night anyway."
She pulled the loose thread off the blanket and dropped it.
"I’m not agreeing to that one," she said. "But you’ve made it true anyway, just by saying it out loud in an empty room. I think that was the point."
"It was sort of the point."
They started an hour later.
He couldn’t sit properly. He couldn’t put his hands into the position the method needed, so she talked him through a different version of it. He sat with his palms turned up and open on his knees, like a beggar.
"That isn’t how it’s supposed to be done," she said. "But the position isn’t what matters. The position is only there so that a room full of nine-year-olds all look the same to the teacher."
The way the Qi moved was nothing like the Han Clan’s method.
The clan’s method worked like filling a bucket. You pulled energy in, moved it around your body twice, and pushed it down into your dantian. Whatever stayed, stayed. Han Jiu had done that maybe forty thousand times.
The Deepwinter Canon didn’t fill anything. It built up layers. Each time the Qi went around, it laid a thin sheet of Qi on top of the last one and pressed it down flat. The pressing was where the real work happened. It felt less like pouring water and more like folding metal.
He got it wrong eleven times.
On the twelfth try, the fold worked. All at once, the Qi in his chest went heavy and very cold, and he made a noise he wasn’t proud of.
"That’s the first fold," said Yun Qingshuang. "There are eleven more. Each one takes longer than the one before."
"How long would it take to learn all twelve?"
"For me, at eight years old, with a teacher and a jade slip and nothing else to do all day? Four months." She didn’t try to make the next part sound better. "For you, in twenty-eight days, with a Dross root and no hands? You’ll learn four folds. Maybe five, if you don’t sleep. I’d rather you slept."
"Are four folds enough to double me?"
"No. Four folds give you about half of the doubling." She turned her palm over. "But half is still better than nothing. The sixth stage with four folds comes to about forty-eight."
Han Jiu did the maths.
Forty-eight.
He thought about the creature in the tunnel that had slid past his boots in the dark. It had carried exactly that number above its head. At the time, it had felt like an impossible amount of power to be standing next to.
’Twenty-eight days,’ he thought. ’And then I’ll be as strong as that thing in the tunnel.’
Across the room, his wife had lain down on her side with her back to him. About forty seconds after the lesson ended, she was breathing like she was asleep. She had just committed a crime that could cost her the use of her own body. And she had made sure he wouldn’t get the chance to thank her for it.
Han Jiu looked at the three hundred pieces of frostmarrow waiting in his Rebate Inventory, and he smiled.
’Sorry,’ he thought. ’But when it comes to giving, you’re never going to beat me.’