Chapter 20

Chapter 20: Chapter 20

The first thing she did was seal the door.

Lanying turned toward the crawlway with her burning arm cradled against her chest, lifted her right hand, and exhaled. Frost poured from her palm in a thick white stream. It filled the mouth of the crawlway from floor to ceiling and hardened there, layer over layer, until the passage was sealed shut by a wall of ice as clear and solid as glass.

The sounds of the mine vanished. Only the faint hiss of the lantern and her ragged breathing.

"Whatever happens in here," she said, "stays in here."

The effort cost her. She swayed on her feet, and Yan Shuo caught her before she could hit the stone.

’I’ll be elsewhere,’ Qin Wuyue said quietly in his head. ’Deep in the jade, where I can’t hear a thing. Keep your face away from her eyes when it opens, brat. And be gentle with her.’

Then the pendant went cold and silent against his chest. For the first time since the night of the banquet, he was entirely alone in his own skull.

He didn’t know how to begin. He had never done this. And judging by the way her fingers had locked into the front of his rough robe, he suspected she hadn’t either.

So he began the exact way they always did. He sat down on the cloak she’d spread across the scorched floor, she sat facing him, and he took her hands.

The thread of resonance spun out between them, fine as silk. The fire chewing through her arm slowed. She let out a long, shuddering breath.

"That’s how it starts," he said quietly. "The rest is the same, only more. If you want to stop, at any point, we stop."

"I won’t want to stop." Her voice was steady. "Stop telling me what I’ll want."

Despite everything, he almost smiled.

She drew one hand free and laid it against his cheek. Her palm was freezing against one side of his jaw from her ice, and scorching hot at the wrist from the brand. She looked at him for a long moment in the lantern light.

Then she leaned in and kissed him.

It was clumsy. Her nose bumped his. Neither of them knew where to put their hands. She tasted of mountain-snow tea and the sharp iron of her bitten lip. When she pulled back, the tips of her ears were scarlet, and she was glaring at him as though he’d done something wrong.

"Don’t laugh," she said.

"I’m not laughing."

"You’re about to." She complained.

"I’m not," he murmured, and kissed her back, much more carefully this time.

After a moment, she stopped glaring. Her lips parted under his, tentative at first, and then with a sudden, desperate heat that stole the breath straight from his lungs.

Every time they touched, the thread thickened. When his hands slid the heavy cloak from her shoulders, it doubled. When she pushed his rough robe open and laid her burning palm flat against his bare chest, it became a cord, and then a rope, and then it stopped being anything he could measure at all.

His hands found the sash of her sleeping robe. His fingers were calloused from six years of iron picks; her silk was softer than anything he had ever touched. When he parted the fabric from her shoulders, the dying lantern light caught the pale, flawless curve of her collarbone, and then the soft swell of her breasts, rising and falling with her shallow breaths.

Lanying shivered, and for once the cold had nothing to do with it. It was the way he looked at her. A deep, rose-colored flush crept down from her throat, warming the pale skin of her chest.

He leaned down, pressing his mouth to the hollow of her throat, and then lower, over the curve of her breast, right where her heart hammered frantic and fast against her ribs. His rough palm came up to cup the soft weight of her, his thumb brushing across the rosy peak, and Lanying let out a broken, breathless sound, her fingers tangling fiercely in his hair to pull him closer.

When he pulled her down onto the spread cloak and their bare skin met fully—chest to chest, her soft curves pressed tight against the lean, scarred muscle of his body—he felt the fire leave her.

It bled out of her arm and into him wherever their bodies touched, a slow red heat that rolled through his meridian like lamp oil catching flame. It hurt. A deep, searing ache. He set his teeth against the soft skin of her shoulder and drew it in deeper anyway, spreading it out, thinning it the way a man spreads a burning coal across a wide hearth so it can’t catch the house. Under his hands, as he traced the arch of her waist and the heave of her ribs, the angry glow in her forearm dimmed from coal to ember, then to a faint rosy line.

Lanying gasped against his throat, her legs tangling with his on the wool cloak. There was no pain in the sound at all.

Her cold came into him then. It poured through his meridian and met the fire waiting there. Frost and flame twisted around each other, colliding and merging until they became something that was neither. Deep inside the hidden cave below his dantian, the coal blazed so fiercely he felt the heat in the roots of his teeth.

He buried his face in her hair, his weight pressing her into the cloak as they moved together. He felt his eyes turn silver and kept them hidden there, pressed tight against the cool, silver tangle while the light rose beneath his skin.

She didn’t notice. Her eyes were closed, her arms locked tight around his neck, her bare breasts crushed against his chest with every ragged breath. Frost was blooming wildly across the black walls of the chamber in great white ferns, climbing toward the ceiling and glittering in the dying light. The lantern itself was guttering out.

The biting cold of the ice-sealed chamber and the fierce, slick warmth where their naked bodies met. Her silver hair falling across both of them like a silk curtain. The sound she made, low and astonished against his mouth, when the resonance opened all the way—the way her nails bit into his bare back, and the way she whispered his name, his given name, for the very first time, as though she’d been keeping it somewhere safe.

And the flood.

It came through Harmony, only this time it didn’t stop. Her feelings rolled through him and stayed, as clear and sharp as his own. Her bone-deep terror of the brand. Her relief, enormous and dizzying, as the fire finally drained out of her. Her fierce embarrassment, which never quite went away. And her wanting—sharp, aching, and new, surprising her more than anything, and which she made no effort at all to hide as she arched up against him in the dark.

He felt her find his feelings in turn. He felt her go completely still with recognition when she did.

Then, deep inside him, the locks turned.

The first gave way in a meridian that had been dark since he was thirteen. A slow, heavy turning, like a rusted key finally yielding in an old door. Qi poured into a channel that had stood empty for six years, and he arched against her without meaning to, a groan tearing from his throat.

Then a second. Another seal cracking, another dark channel flooding with blinding light.

The fourth layer of Qi Gathering filled to the brim and overflowed. The fifth rose through him in a single long breath, and then, without a heartbeat’s pause, the sixth.

In his arms, Lanying shivered and cried out softly as qi rushed back into her from his side of the bond—warm, bright, and entirely hers to keep. He felt it race through her meridians and heal them, sealing the scorched channels behind it, leaving them cool and whole and stronger than before.

On her wrist, pressed hard against the back of his neck, the brand made a small, sharp sound.

And far below them, deep in the roots of the mountain, the dying vein answered.

He felt it travel through the stone. Through the floor, through the cloak, straight up his own spine. A single, slow pulse, deeper and stronger than any he had felt before. It was as if a starving thing had lifted its head in the dark at a sound it hadn’t heard in a very long time.

Then it settled back into the rock, and was still.

The lantern had burned out entirely by the time either of them moved.

The only light came from the frost. It covered every inch of the chamber walls now, thick and white and faintly luminous, like moonlight trapped in ice. Lanying lay bare against his side with her heavy cloak pulled over both of them and her head resting on his shoulder. Her breathing was slow and even, her skin still warm where it pressed against his.

She lifted her left wrist and held it up to the frost-light.

The brand was still there, a small golden coin beneath her pale skin. But the fire had gone out of it. It sat dull and lifeless now, the color of tarnished brass, with a fine fracture running straight across its face from edge to edge.

She turned her wrist back and forth. She pressed her thumb hard against the mark. It stayed cold.

"It’s quiet," she whispered. "I can’t feel him."

"The fire’s gone," Yan Shuo said. His voice was rough. "It might still let him find you. But he can’t burn you through it anymore. Not like that."

She was silent for a long time.

"How do you know that?"

He said nothing. After a moment, he felt her remember their bargain, and she let the question drop.

"My meridians," she murmured instead, very softly. "They’re healed. Better than healed. I can actually feel the vein in the walls now. I couldn’t, before." She paused. "And you. Your qi. It’s entirely different."

"I’m already at sixth layer," he said.

She turned her head and stared at him in the dim white glow.

"Sixth?"

"Sixth."

"Two layers. In a single night." Langyin was shocked.

At the title, her mouth tightened. She looked away, staring up at the frost on the ceiling, and he felt her begin to build her walls again, one block of ice at a time.

She dressed in the grey gloom before dawn with her back to him, moving quickly and precisely. She drew the silk robe back over her pale shoulders and tied the sash tight. She bound her silver hair high with the pin of carved ice and fastened her dark cloak. By the time she turned around, the girl from the dark was gone. She was the Frost Lotus Fairy again—pale, straight, and untouchable. Only the faint flush lingering along her cheekbones and the bruised look of her lips gave anything away.

She crossed to the crawlway and laid her palm flat against the wall of ice. It began to melt, softly, from the center outward.

She stopped with her hand still resting on the wet glass.

"Junior brother," she said, without turning around.

"Yes, Senior Sister."

"Last night was a cultivation necessity. My meridians were burning. You knew a method to stop it, and we used it." Her voice was cool, level, and very carefully chosen. "I am grateful. I won’t pretend otherwise."

The ice in the crawlway thinned to a fragile pane. Through it, faintly, came the sound of Ruan Tie snoring by the red markers.

Lanying lifted her chin.

"But it changes nothing," she said. And she stepped through the melting ice before he could see her face.