The pill sat in his palm. It didn’t look like much.
Han Jiu had seen Qi Condensing Pills before. Every spring, at the assessment, the clan handed them out. Each boy who had shown enough power to be worth the cost got one. The steward carried the lacquer box of pills across the courtyard with both hands, like it might explode. For five years in a row, Han Jiu had watched that box go right past him.
Those pills had been low-grade. They were chalky grey, about the size of a pea.
This one was pale blue, and it was heavier than it looked.
"You’ve been staring at that thing forever," Yun Qingshuang said.
"I’m getting ready."
"It’s a Qi Condensing Pill. Nine-year-olds eat them."
"Nine-year-olds eat the cheap ones." He tilted his hand carefully. His fingers still wouldn’t close, and he didn’t want to find out what would happen if he dropped it. "The clan buys low-grade ones by the crate. Two thousand stones for forty. The steward argues about the price for two days, and then he comes back and tells the whole hall what a good deal he got."
"And that one is mid-grade."
Han Jiu nodded.
She didn’t ask where he got it. She had stopped asking after the third time he didn’t answer. He didn’t think that meant she had forgotten about it.
"Then swallow it before someone knocks on the door," she said.
"That’s the problem."
He closed his hand as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far.
"How loud was I the other night?"
She looked up.
"You went from the second stage to the third," she said. "That’s the smallest breakthrough there is, and I still heard it through a wall, with the shutters closed."
"There are twelve Yun cultivators sleeping ninety feet away from this room."
"Fourteen. Two more came up the road yesterday." She was already working on the problem. He could see her thinking. "Going from the third stage to the fourth is louder. When you break through, your Qi leaves your old limit before it finds the new one. While it’s looking, it spreads out. Anyone at the fifth stage or higher within a hundred feet will feel it, and they’ll know exactly what it was."
"So I can’t do it here."
"You can’t do it anywhere in this valley. There are two clans on this mountain, and half of them are watching us." She turned her hand over and looked at her own palm. "But you could do it under something."
"Under what?"
"A bigger noise."
Han Jiu counted ten pieces of frostmarrow out of the inventory and put them in her hand.
"This is going to be unpleasant for me," she said.
"How unpleasant?"
"Ten at once is about four times more than I can hold. Most of it will come straight back out of me as cold." She was already sitting down on the bed, with her back straight and her hands open on her knees. "There’ll be so much cold that anyone who notices will think someone left a door open on the north side of the house. That’s your cover. Start when I start."
"Qingshuang—"
"If you’re about to say something noble, I’d honestly rather you just took the pill."
He took the pill.
It went down like swallowing a mouthful of the frost pool. The cold spread out from his stomach in two heartbeats, and it kept spreading, further than his body seemed to go. He had time to think that a fifty-stone low-grade pill had never felt anything like this. Then he swallowed the second pill, and after that he couldn’t think about anything at all.
Across the room, the frostmarrow burst like a bucket of ice water thrown against a wall.
The air turned white. Frost crawled up the shutters, across the ceiling, over the water jar, and out under the door in a thin, fast sheet. The cold coming off Yun Qingshuang was so strong that it felt like something heavy pressing down on him.
Underneath all that cold, quietly, his limit broke.
His first breakthrough had felt like shoving open a stuck door. This one felt like the floor giving way beneath him. He fell through it. All the Qi that had been packed tightly inside him for three days spread out at once, filling up a body that had just become bigger.
Somewhere outside, a man cursed about the cold.
Then everything settled. Han Jiu was lying on his side on the floor, with frost in his eyebrows.
Qi Gathering, fourth stage.
He moved his Qi before he had even decided to.
Eight black bulls appeared above his head, small and faint, walking in a circle. They took up a lot more space than four ever had.
Eight.
Han Bo had reached eight when he was eleven years old. Every boy in the outer courtyard passed eight and forgot all about it by the summer. But Han Jiu lay on the floor of a frozen storeroom, looking up at the most ordinary number in the Six Valleys, and he couldn’t stop looking at it.
"Make them go away," Yun Qingshuang said.
He made them go away.
"How bad was it?"
"There’s frost on the outside of the door." She got up and shook out her sleeves. The grey shadows had come back under her eyes. Not much, but they were there. "That’s ten pieces gone, and I’m exactly where I was before. We both knew that would happen. Was it worth it?"
"I’m at the fourth stage."
"Then it was worth it." She said it as simply as if she were telling him the date, and she started scraping frost off the inside of the shutter with the side of her hand. "Now go outside."
"What?"
"Right now, while the whole north wall is white and everyone out there is blaming the weather. If you come out of this room an hour from now, with the door frozen shut behind you, someone is going to ask questions. If you come out now, you’re just a man who was sitting in a cold room."
...
The courtyard was full of Yun cultivators, complaining.
Han Jiu came out with the water bucket hooked over his arm, because his fingers couldn’t hold the handle. He walked toward the well slowly, like a man with nowhere to be.
All fourteen of them had come out of their rooms into the grey morning. They were standing around, annoyed about the cold. Two of them were looking at the north wall of the storeroom. Frost had spread up the stone in a big fan shape, and it was already starting to drip off the roof.
Nobody looked at Han Jiu. For his whole life, nobody had ever bothered to look at him. This was the first time he had ever been grateful for it.
He lowered the bucket down the well and started winding it back up. It was hard to do with only his forearms.
Behind him, someone started practising a sword form.
He felt it before he heard it. The man’s Qi came up off the stones in a slow wave, and Han Jiu’s own Qi rose up to meet it before he could stop it.
He clamped down on it hard.
’No. I can’t let it show!’
His arms locked tight on the rope. He stood there, with his back to fourteen Yun cultivators, holding a bucket that was already all the way up. He pushed his Qi down flat, and he held it there until the wave had passed.
Nothing appeared above his head.
His heart was pounding.
"You’re the husband."
A man had walked up beside him at the well. Han Jiu hadn’t heard him coming. That told him something about the man. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with his sleeves pushed up. He looked relaxed and easy, like someone who had never once had to worry about how much anything cost.
"I’m the husband," Han Jiu said.
"Huh." The Yun cultivator looked him up and down. He didn’t seem to mean any harm by it. "We made a bet. I said you’d have thrown yourself down a well by now. Rong says you’ll last until the assessment, because a man can put up with anything as long as he knows when it ends."
"Rong wins."
"Rong usually does." He leaned against the edge of the well. "It’s at the end of the month, isn’t it? Coldpeak comes up the north road, and the whole valley lines up to show them what it’s got."
"Something like that."
"And you’ll show them two." He said it without any meanness at all. It was just something someone had told him, and he had no reason to doubt it. "Elder Yun brings it up about twice a day. People have started saying it like a joke."
Han Jiu set the bucket on the edge of the well and left it there while he caught his breath.
"I’m sure they have," he said.
...
He got back to the storeroom with half a bucket of water and no feeling left in his arms.
Yun Qingshuang had opened the shutters and cleaned up most of the frost. The blanket was hanging over the bed frame to dry. She looked up when he came in, and she stopped what she was doing.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. A Yun man at the well wanted to tell me about a bet." He put the bucket down with his elbow. "He also said Coldpeak comes up the north road at the end of the month."
"They do."
"He said it like it was the only road."
"For nine out of ten people in this valley, it is." She went back to the blanket. "The Coldpeak Sect is three days away. The Ironrain Sect is six days away, and the Whitegrass Sect is nine. Neither of those two has ever taken more than two people a year from the Six Valleys. Why would they bother? Coldpeak gets first pick, and takes whoever it wants. The other two get whatever’s left over."
"So if I show forty—"
"Then Coldpeak takes you. Of course they do. That’s what the number is for, that’s the whole—"
She stopped.
Han Jiu had been reaching for the water ladle. He never picked it up. When he turned around, her face had gone white.
"Qingshuang?"
"Sit down," she said.
"What’s—"
"Sit down, and don’t move your Qi. Not even one fold. Not until I’ve thought this all the way through."