Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Chapter 8

Chi Yao didn’t wait for an invitation.

He walked past Lanying, through the open screen, and into the sickroom. The frost on the medicine jars hissed and beaded into water as he passed. Fire-path qi rolled off him in a warm, lazy haze, and the cold Lanying had brought into the room retreated before it like mist before the morning sun.

Ruan Tie, still caught halfway through his bow, straightened slowly. Bai Rou also folded her hands. Her soft face showed absolutely nothing at all.

Outside, the courtyard had begun to fill. Medicine Valley was never quiet in the mornings: apprentices hauled baskets of herbs between drying racks, outer disciples queued for salves, and a pair of junior physicians were arguing over a cauldron. All of it stopped. Every head in the courtyard turned toward the sickroom, where the Frost Lotus Fairy and her famous fiance had just walked in on a bandaged nobody.

Yan Shuo counted the faces through the open screen. Twenty. Thirty. More arriving by the second.

This was going to happen in public, then. It was about to become a spectacle instead of a private humiliation.

"So this is where you’ve been hiding," Chi Yao said pleasantly, looking down at the cot. "Wine boy. I was told you’d had an accident."

"Young Master." Yan Shuo began to push himself upright.

"No, no, don’t get up." Chi Yao waved a hand lazily. "I’m sure it hurts. What was it? A fall in the mines?"

"Yes, Young Master."

"How careless." Chi Yao tilted his head, studying the splint, the bruised face, the bandages wound tightly around his ribs. "You know, I’m a little disappointed. Three nights ago you seemed so steady. A servant who doesn’t shake, even when he’s being laughed at." His smile widened, showing perfect white teeth. "And now look at you. One fall, and you’re lying in bed while my fiancee brings you pills."

"I came for Elder Shen’s pills," Lanying said from the doorway. "As I told you."

"Of course you did, my dear."

Chi Yao didn’t even look at her. He reached into his wide sleeve and drew out a small red pill, perfectly round, glowing faintly from within like a banked coal.

"Blazing Sun Restoration Pill," he said, holding it up so the entire courtyard could see. A ripple of sharp murmurs ran through the watching crowd. "My clan’s own recipe. It heals broken bones in a single day. In Blazing Sun City, a pill like this costs more than a service disciple earns in ten years."

He held it out over the cot.

Yan Shuo looked at it, and did not reach for it.

’Careful,’ Qin Wuyue murmured in his mind. ’This is a hook with bait on it.’

’I know.’

"Go on," Chi Yao coaxed softly. "Take it. A gift. My clan is famously generous to the Azure Cloud’s servants."

Yan Shuo slowly lifted his good hand.

Chi Yao opened his fingers. And the pill dropped, bounced once off the edge of the wooden cot, and rolled across the floorboards. It came to rest in the grit and dust beside the leg of Bai Rou’s stool, glowing softly in the shadows.

"Oh dear," Chi Yao sighed. "Clumsy of me."

The courtyard went dead silent.

"Well?" Chi Yao turned his warm, amused eyes back to the cot. "It’s still good. A little dust never hurts a servant. Pick it up, wine boy."

Yan Shuo understood exactly what was being asked of him.

He would have to climb off the cot with three cracked ribs, get down on his knees on the floor in front of thirty witnesses, and fish a pill out of the dirt at the feet of the man who had dropped it. And then he would have to thank him for it.

If he refused, he would be a servant who had openly insulted a guest of honor—the heir of the clan whose spirit vein was about to save the entire sect. The Law Hall would be delighted. Elder Gu wouldn’t even have to invent a reason to execute him.

If he obeyed, the whole sect would hear by sundown that the Frost Lotus Fairy had visited a sickbed, only for the wretch in it to crawl on the floor for her fiance’s scraps. Lanying’s visit would be reduced to a pathetic joke. And the joke would be safe. Nobody suspected a man who crawled.

He had crawled before, countless times. Out of sheer need to survive.

’Brat,’ Qin said quietly. ’Pride is expensive. Can you afford it today?’

’No.’

Yan Shuo pushed back the thin blanket.

His ribs screamed when he swung his legs off the edge of the cot. He set his teeth, let the pain wash through him, and kept his face blank. Ruan Tie made a strangled noise in his throat and started forward, but Yan Shuo caught his eye and shook his head once, very slightly. Ruan Tie stopped, his fists clenching and unclenching helplessly at his sides.

Yan Shuo lowered himself onto one knee. Then the other. The floorboards were cool and gritty under his bare palms.

The courtyard watched in total, breathless silence.

He reached for the pill.

"Enough."

The word cracked across the room like thick river ice snapping under a heavy boot. Every single medicine jar on the shelves rang in unison. Frost exploded across the floorboards in a spreading white fan, racing from the doorway straight to the cot, and the glowing red pill froze solid in a thick shell of ice a mere inch from Yan Shuo’s trembling fingers.

Lanying stood in the doorway with her sleeve lifted. Cold poured off her in visible, suffocating waves. Several of the onlookers in the courtyard took a hasty, fearful step back.

"Young Master Chi," she said. Each word was perfectly courteous, and each one landed like a drawn blade laid flat on a table. "You are a guest of the Azure Cloud Sect. This is Medicine Valley, where the sect’s sick are treated. You are humiliating an injured disciple of my sect, in my sect’s sickroom, in front of my sect’s people."

She lowered her arm.

"The Chi Clan’s generosity has been noted. You may stop displaying it."

Chi Yao turned to look at her for the very first time since he’d entered. For a split second, his handsome face became hot and ugly, like a sudden flare from a dark furnace.

Then, he laughed.

"My dear, you completely misunderstand me. I was only trying to help the poor fellow." He spread his hands gracefully, appealing to the stunned crowd. "But my fiancee has a tender heart for her sect’s servants. I suppose I’ll have to get used to that." He shook his head ruefully, and a few people in the courtyard laughed with him, as if relieved.

Bai Rou picked up the frozen pill between two delicate fingers. She examined it with detached, professional interest.

"The ice won’t harm it," she said to no one in particular. "I’ll keep it for a patient who actually needs it. Thank you for the donation, Young Master." She tucked it smoothly into her sleeve and turned to Ruan Tie. "Help him back onto the cot, please. Gently. If he reopens those wounds, I’ll be very cross."

Ruan Tie leapt forward as if released from an iron chain.

Chi Yao watched all of this with his smile rigidly in place. Then he strolled back to the doorway and offered Lanying his arm.

"Shall we, my dear? Your master will be waiting for the pills."

Lanying looked at the offered arm. For one long breath, she didn’t move.

Then she laid her fingertips on his sleeve. The gold brand on her wrist glowed a dull, warning red through the fabric.

They walked out together through the parting crowd. Lanying didn’t look back but at the gate, Chi Yao did.

His eyes found Yan Shuo on the cot, across the entire length of the courtyard, and held him there for a long moment. Then he was gone.

"I’m going to kill him," Ruan Tie growled, the second the courtyard had emptied enough for privacy. "I’m going to find his guest house tonight and pull his arms off and beat him to death with them."

"He’s at Foundation Peak, brother," Yan Shuo said. He lay back on the cot, sweating heavily, his cracked ribs throbbing in time with his racing heart. "He’d turn you into charcoal before you even got to the front door."

"Then I’ll be very angry charcoal."

Bai Rou was silently cleaning the frost-water off the floorboards with a coarse rag. She paused and glanced up.

"You were going to pick it up," she stated.

"Yes."

"In front of everyone."

"Yes. I’m just a service disciple, nothing more"

She studied him for a moment with that bright, deeply unsettling focus of hers. Then she went back to her rag without another word. But he thought she understood what he meant.

The Frost Lotus Fairy, though, had just frozen the floor of Medicine Valley to stop him. Thirty people had seen it happen.

’That,’ Qin Wuyue said heavily, ’was the opposite of helpful.’

Yan Shuo closed his eyes. ’She meant well.’

’Of course she meant well, brat. That’s exactly what makes it so dangerous.’

The guest residence on Cloudpiercer Peak had been built explicitly to intimidate visiting dignitaries. It had soaring moon gates, a koi pond fed by pure spirit water, and a wide pavilion where the evening light fell through carved screens in the sweeping patterns of drifting clouds.

Chi Yao sat alone in the pavilion with a cup of wine he hadn’t touched.

He was thinking about the night of the banquet. About the brand. For one full hour after the wine had nearly spilled, the Sun Brand on his fiancee’s wrist had burned—a warning pulse of resonance that traveled back to him through his own connected qi. He had assumed it was just her icy temper flaring. Lanying had always despised the brand. He’d let it go.

But today, she had stood in a sickroom with a servant for a quarter of an hour, behind a closed screen.

Chi Yao didn’t believe for a single moment that a first-layer worm from the coal mines could be any kind of genuine rival. The very idea was absurd. But a betrothal was a strict contract, and a fiancee’s attention was property. Property that wandered had to be fenced in.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel path outside.

A tall young man in the grey robes of an outer disciple approached the pavilion, bowed low, and stayed bowed. His right wrist was heavily bound in a thick wooden splint.

"Zhao Kun, Young Master. You sent for me."

"I did." Chi Yao set his jade cup down. "Rise. I understand you and the wine boy had a little encounter in the deep mines."

Zhao Kun straightened slowly. A muscle jumped wildly in his jaw.

"He’s trash, Young Master. Elder Gu wanted him tested. There was absolutely nothing in him."

"And your wrist?"

"I slipped."

Chi Yao smiled. He had seen enough liars in his life to recognize one easily, and enough humiliated men to know when one was cornered.

"I’m sure you did." He reached into his wide sleeve and set a small wooden box on the table between them. When he flicked the lid open with his thumb, red light spilled out across the carved screens: three Blazing Sun Restoration Pills. "For your wrist. And there is a heavy pouch of mid-grade spirit stones beside it, if you’d like to reach the eighth layer before the year is out."

Zhao Kun stared down at the glowing box. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing sharply.

"What does the Young Master need?"

Chi Yao picked up his wine at last and looked out at the darkening cloudsea, letting the silence stretch out thick and heavy beneath his words.

"The deep mines are so dangerous," he murmured softly. "Old tunnels. Bad air. Tragic accidents happen all the time, I’m told."

He took a slow sip, the amber liquid catching the very last of the dying daylight.

"You mean... make him disappear."