She straightened up off the boulder.
The irritation cleared out of her face entirely. The aloof expression came back over it.
She turned and set off for the guest lodge.
Faster and faster as she went.
Going over the ledger in her head as she walked.
Yesterday she had told Lin Jin the way — the guest lodge at the foot of Purple Sun Peak, kept by outer sect disciples. She had given him the token too. Moonstone marrow. A Transmission Pavilion access token, with the character for sword on the reverse.
Show an outer sect disciple a thing like that and he would enshrine you as an ancestor and feed you your fill.
By any reasonable account.
He should have eaten and drunk well at the lodge, slept soundly, and come to meet her in the morning bright and clear-headed.
Chu Qingxue walked faster and faster until she was very nearly running.
Spiritual power spilled out of her meridians; her toes struck the bluestone and carried her forward light as a feather. If riding a sword inside the peak's barrier had been permitted, she would have flown to the lodge long ago.
That man.
Here she was with the thunderhead of an exposed body-snatching over her, the blade of the recruitment lecture at her neck, and the traitor's nail somewhere in the dark, walking a wire every single day — and he had managed to contribute one fresh thing to worry about by day two.
Where was the justice in that.
The road widened by degrees. The outer sect district began.
The grey sheds the menial disciples lived in squatted in rows along the roadside. A dilapidated tea pavilion, with a few mortal merchants crouched at its edge gnawing dry rations and drinking their tea. Several menial disciples in short grey-blue robes were sweeping and hauling water. A few outer sect disciples with iron swords at their hips were walking off toward the Transmission Grounds.
Then the first person saw her.
A menial disciple sweeping the road. Thirteen or fourteen, in a short coarse tunic washed pale, one trouser leg rolled up. He was bent over a pile of fallen leaves when a white shape caught the edge of his vision, and he looked up.
The broom slid out of his fingers and clattered to the ground, rolling half a turn.
His mouth hung slightly open and would not close.
The companion hauling water beside him clapped his shoulder, and before the words were out his gaze followed and he too went still.
The bucket left his hands and slammed down, and the water it threw soaked a pair of cloth shoes through.
He looked down at the wet shoes.
Then looked up at that white shape again.
And never looked down again.
Within moments the entire road had gone silent.
The sweeping stopped. The water-haulers forgot the water. At the edge of the tea pavilion a mortal merchant gnawing his ration let his hand go slack, and the flatbread fell; he bent to retrieve it, and his fingers had only just touched its surface before he straightened up again.
A menial disciple drinking tea from a coarse bowl tilted his wrist and poured half of it down his own sleeve, and never noticed, only stood and stared.
Somebody let out a low cry.
"Is that...!"
"Senior Sister Qingxue?"
"What is she doing over on the outer sect side?"
"It really is her...!"
After the low murmuring, seven or eight of them set their work down on the spot and followed along at a distance behind Chu Qingxue. Ten-odd zhang back. Nobody dared come closer than that.
But that distance was more than enough to see clearly.
Morning light spilled down; the white robes gave off a faint spiritual glow, the silver hair stirred in the wind, and her step was like walking on water.
"Senior Sister Qingxue hardly ever comes to the outer sect...!" one outer sect disciple said, holding his voice down, and it shook slightly anyway.
"Quiet," the man beside him answered on a breath. "Don't disturb Senior Sister."
Chu Qingxue heard it.
Heard all of it.
Her back teeth came together without her intending it.
She was thoroughly fed up.
She had waited three hours for Lin Jin and that dog had not shown so much as a shadow. And now she had a crowd of outer sect disciples trailing along behind her looking at her like a monkey in a cage.
Pictures started up in her head, uninvited.
Lin Jin, arrested by the mountain patrol as a suspicious mortal.
Lin Jin, missing a step and falling into a ditch.
Lin Jin, running into some cultivator of dubious character.
With a frame like his he could not outrun anyone, let alone fight.
She should never have let him walk off alone.
She should have taken him back to the cave dwelling yesterday. Throwing him in the woodshed would still have beaten letting him walk a mountain road by himself.
She walked faster and faster, a faint line forming between her brows, her lips pressed tight and pulled down.
Then she stopped.
And turned around.
Behind her came a burst of scrambling.
The outer sect disciple at the front could not check his feet and staggered half a step forward. The second man's nose struck the back of the first man's head with a dull sound. The several behind them braked in a flurry, and one of them trod a shoe clean off the man in front.
Chu Qingxue lifted her chin a fraction. Her gaze swept from left to right.
Every man it passed over lowered his head.
"Junior brothers." She spoke.
Her voice was not loud, and it was cool and clear. "Was there something?"
Nobody answered. The whole group quietly shuffled their feet backward.
After a few breaths of silence, a lanky outer sect disciple was pushed out from behind by the others. He lurched half a step forward, caught the toe of the man behind him with his heel and nearly went down, steadied himself in a hurry, then cupped his hands and bowed until his back was very nearly level with the ground.
"S-Senior Sister Qingxue, please don't be angry!"
"We only thought, since Senior Sister so rarely comes to the outer sect — if there is anything at all to fetch or any word to carry, or any other matter, Senior Sister need only give the order and we will do everything in our power to see it done."
Chu Qingxue glanced at him.
"That will not be necessary."
Her speech was a shade quicker than usual.
"Stop following me. I understand that you mean well."
She paused, and it occurred to her suddenly that when the original owner met a situation like this, she would deliver a short lecture.
Then her gaze went over the group.
Outer sect disciples, menial disciples, every one of them with head lowered and eyes down.
"Would this time not be better spent on cultivation?"
Nobody picked it up. A few of the outer sect disciples looked at one another, and some of them dropped their heads.
"The basic sword art. Have you drilled it to fluency?"
The outer sect disciples who caught the question lowered their heads as one.
The lanky one opened his mouth and could not produce a single word.
Chu Qingxue's gaze went past them and settled on the several menial disciples at the back. Those men wore older clothes still, coarse grey stuff gone dusty, cuffs frayed out, and they were pressed together clutching at their own belts and hems.
"Your assessment is not far off now, is it."
Several of the menials jerked their heads up.
"Cultivate diligently, and you can become outer sect disciples."
"Rather than standing about here wasting the time for nothing."
"Is that understood?"
The menial disciples bowed as one. "Understood."
"Then if it is understood, disperse."
Nobody moved.
Chu Qingxue said nothing further.
She turned around.
And left.
Faster this time.
The white figure receded into the morning light, turned into the bamboo grove ahead, and the last flick of a hem flashed between the stems and was gone.
Behind her the crowd was still standing where it was.
A few breaths later the lanky outer sect disciple's knees gave and he sat down on the ground. He looked up at the sky and did not speak for a long time.
The others took to a wall or took to a tree, one after another.
One of them braced his knees and bent over to get his breath.
The menial with the wet foot finally looked down at his own trouser leg, as though he had only just registered it.
"So beautiful."
The outer sect disciple slumped on the ground stared up at the sky with a look on his face like something out of a dream. "When Senior Sister Qingxue was scolding me just now, my heart was beating so hard it nearly came out of my throat."
"Was that scolding?" one of the menial disciples said suddenly. "Senior Sister was plainly telling us to work at our cultivation."
"She asked how our basic sword art was coming along, and she remembered the date of the menial disciples' assessment...!"
Another menial nodded.
"I'm going back to read the sword manual front to back."
"I'll come too."
"Count me in as well."
Meanwhile the lanky outer sect disciple who had been pushed forward to answer stood at the back of the group with his fingertips resting on a palm-sized pale green message jade butterfly at his waist, and then a thought struck him and he slapped himself hard on the forehead.
"I nearly forgot! Senior Brother Lei Wujie told me specially — if I ever spotted Senior Sister Qingxue coming down the mountain, I was to send word to him the moment it happened!"
The words were barely out before he raised the butterfly between his fingers, passed a thin thread of spiritual energy into it, and the patterns on its surface lit up. A voice message shot away along the spirit veins toward Thundercry Peak.
"Senior Brother Lei, big news! Senior Sister Qingxue came to the outer sect in person today!"
Not two breaths later a man's voice burst out of the butterfly, thick with astonishment and pitched too loud to contain, so that every disciple standing nearby heard it clearly.
"What? Qingxue? She actually went to the outer sect? Are you certain you did not mistake her?"
The lanky disciple gripped the butterfly, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice, and answered loudly. "Absolutely certain! Every menial and outer sect junior brother on the whole road saw her with their own eyes! Senior Sister even stopped to give us guidance just now, telling everyone to drill the basic sword art diligently and not fritter our time away!"
The butterfly went quiet for a moment, and then Lei Wujie's hearty voice came through again, unable to hide how pleased he was. "Good. I understand. You handled this news well. Come to the main hall on Thundercry Peak first thing tomorrow morning and collect a hundred low-grade spirit stones!"
The spiritual light winked out on the instant, and the message butterfly went dull again.
The disciples who had heard the whole exchange erupted, envious stares nailing themselves to the lanky disciple from every direction, one exclamation after another.
"A hundred spirit stones? For nothing but passing on word that Senior Sister came by?"
"Heavens. A hundred spirit stones would buy me a year of cultivation pills!"
"No wonder they say Senior Brother Lei Wujie spends freely. Anything with the faintest connection to Senior Sister Qingxue and he throws a hundred stones at it. Generous, truly!"
The lanky disciple turned the butterfly over in his hand, the corner of his mouth climbing high, already happily reckoning up tomorrow's trip to Thundercry Peak to collect.