Ji Ling’er had been trained for a great many things, and none of them was this.
She had been trained to hold a sword at the hour of dawn with a bowl of water balanced on each wrist, and not spill a drop. She had been trained to read the old sword manuals in four dead tongues. She had been trained to meet a cultivator ten years her elder at the edge of a frozen lake, and to win, and to bow, and to say nothing. She had been taught, above all, that a Saintess of the Feathered Frost does not meddle.
She stood in a road, as she had told her master.
The green mist was upon her before she had finished drawing her sword.
"Four Directions!" she cried, and the four elders of her sect moved as one, spreading to the north, south, east, and west of her, each with a long, pale blade half-drawn, and frost came crawling out of the cobblestones in a great white ring. The mist hit the ring and hissed. Where it touched the frost, the stones blackened and ran like candle wax.
"Frost," said Du Heng, with a thin, interested smile. "How quaint."
He flicked his wrist.
Three needles of green light came out of his sleeve, and Ji Ling’er cut the first with her sword, and the second with the edge of her hand, and the third took Elder Zhen in the shoulder. The old man grunted. His whole arm went green to the wrist, and he stumbled back, and Aunt Liu darted forward to catch him with a pouch of antidote already in her fingers.
He is a Nascent Soul, thought Ji Ling’er, very clearly. We are four Core Formations and a girl at the edge of one. We cannot win this.
We do not have to win. We only have to stand.
She set her feet. She breathed.
The mist came again. This time it did not come as a cloud. It came as a snake, a long, writhing rope of green poison, as thick as a man’s arm, and it struck at her throat with a speed that left no time to think. She threw up her sword. The frost on the blade went black. Her arm ached to the elbow.
She was being pushed back. Step by step, as water drives a boat toward the weir.
And in her mind, quite suddenly, without warning, she saw a thin young man in a patched blue robe with a horsehair broom on his shoulder, walking away down a dim aisle. She saw six faint scratches on a strip of bamboo, made with a thumbnail. She saw the line of a wave, tall as a mountain, parted in two without a ripple.
The Flowing River Turn, she thought. Mended.
She had not forgotten the sixth diagram. She had learned it in six days, and practiced it every night since, with a patience that frightened Aunt Liu. But she had practiced it as a lesson. She had never used it as a sword.
The snake lunged.
Ji Ling’er did not parry. She turned her sword in her hand, as water turns around a stone, a motion so small it seemed no motion at all, and let the poison flow past her blade and down the length of her arm and out into the cold air. Not against it. With it. The frost did not push the venom back. It carried it, and led it, and set it down, gently, in a place where it could do no harm.
"Oh," said Du Heng, and for the first time his thin smile faltered.
Something broke inside her.
It was a small sound, like the crack of thin ice on a pond in spring. It was the same sound that she had heard in the aisle, in the lamplight, with a bamboo scroll in her hands, three weeks ago. It was not an end. It was a door opening.
In her lower abdomen, a thing began to turn.
It was a core. It was not yet a Golden Core, not by a long way, but it was round and cold and white, like a pearl of frost, and it spun once, slowly, in the center of her being, and a sensation of such vast and silent clarity poured through her that for one heartbeat she forgot that there was a battle.
Core Formation.
"Saintess," Aunt Liu gasped. "Your..."
"I know."
The frost on her sword burned white. It ran down the blade, and along the cobblestones, and in a great, widening circle across the whole street, and where it touched the poison mist, the mist froze, and hung, and shattered, like a pane of green glass.
Du Heng staggered back one step.
He was a Nascent Soul. He was easily the stronger. He could, very probably, have killed her. But a man who has never been afraid does not know what it is to be afraid, and in the small, startled space of that one backward step, he looked at the frost, and at the girl in the silver veil, and for a brief second, he was.
"Four Directions!" Ji Ling’er cried again, in a voice like a bell, and the four old elders closed in.
It was not a duel. It was a thing of ice and poison and silence, of steel flashing in the lamplight, of Elder Zhen’s green arm and Aunt Liu’s quick, steady hands, of four old Core Formation masters who had not fought together for forty years and discovered, to their considerable surprise, that they remembered how. Du Heng gave ground, and then more, and then more. His gray robes were rimed with white. His runes had gone dull. He snarled something in an old, ugly dialect, and flung a handful of green powder at the frost, and it burned a hole in the air, and through the hole he saw what she had seen.
The thin young man in the blue robe was not on the steps any more.
He was gone. So was the old Marshal in the black coat, and the boy captain with his nine men. And at the side of the Registry Hall, where a narrow stair ran up to a small, shadowed door, a single guard in crimson lay face-down on the cobbles, with a bandage knotted about his mouth, and the door stood ajar.
"Ah," said Du Heng softly. "The scholar creeps."
"He does not creep," said Ji Ling’er, and put her sword’s edge against his collarbone. "He works. And you are keeping me from the work."
The fourth drum sounded, then the fifth.
On the steps, in the lantern-light, the Imperial Consort of Great Liang folded her white fan with a small, decisive snap.
"Excuse me," she said, to nobody in particular, and turned, and went lightly in at the great doors.