“Me neither,” Lan said. “Only that whore has a three-part name.”
It was almost worth the trouble it might have brought her to see Shàn’jun nearly drop the bowl he held.
Two spots of bright red flushed Dilaya’s cheeks. “Out of my way,” she all but spat at Shàn’jun. “Have you not heard of the rumors all day? The Elantians want her, and that cretin Zen led them right to our gates!”
“Dilaya shi’jietends to speak with exaggeration,” Shàn’jun said, turning to Lan. “I’m sure it’s all just a big misunderstanding. Now, I’m no cook, but would you like a bowl of—”
“What do you mean, ‘Zen led them right to our gates’?” Lan asked Dilaya. “The reason we decided to use that Gate Seal was so that they would not be able to follow.”
“They are closer than they have been for the past twelve cycles, since they destroyed all the schools in the vicinity,” Dilaya snarled. “It cannot be a coincidence that a girl bearing their mark on her arm shows up within our Boundary Seal. Such disgusting Elantian metalwork should never have crossed through. And now I’m going to destroy it, no matter what it takes.”
“Dilaya shi’jie, please,” Shàn’jun said quickly. “I need the Master of Medicine to examine her arm and assess whether there will be any long-term impacts of removing the metalwork. As far as I can see, the spell has embedded itself quite deeply; removing it without proper information may prove dangerous.”
Lan clutched her left arm. The Elantian metalwork had wound through her Seal; Zen said it had unlocked her qì. What if removing it meant damaging her mother’s Seal—or worse?
She could not risk that. Not before she could find out what it meant. Not before she understood why the Elantian magician had spent twelve cycles searching for the mark her mother had left on her—and why he had killed Mama for it.
Not before she could get to Guarded Mountain.
“Don’t touch me or my arm,” Lan said to Dilaya.
Dilaya bared her teeth. Metal rang as she drew a long,curved blade, palming the dao as though it were an extension of her. At this moment Lan realized that, under the girl’s armor, she had only one arm. The sleeve of her right arm fluttered loose.
“We’ll see about that,” Dilaya retorted, and sprang.
Lan reached into herself, leaning into memories, just as she had on the night she’d awakened the yao. She recalled Zen’s voice, teaching her to open her senses to the flow of qì outside and within; the stir of an ancient calling at her core each time he performed a Seal; and the soft echoes of song that seeped through the cracks of her mind, bleeding silver. Haunting her. It was a tune she knew instinctively, drawn from her very blood and bone and soul, filling her like rising ocean water.
The song spilled over, and there came a responding pulse from her left wrist. The scar—theSeal—against her flesh had begun to glow, and even as Lan looked, the brightness grew blinding.
A streak of white light shot skyward before her, cleaving the chamber in monochrome. Lan gasped and flung her hands before her eyes; she heard porcelain shatter, someone hiss, and harried footsteps approaching—
Black flames rose to wreathe the silver light.
The blade itself is naught but a piece of cold steel; it is the wielder who draws blood.
—General Yeshin Noro Surgen of the Jorshen Steel clan,Classic of War
Eleven cycles later, the School of the White Pines looked exactly as it had when Zen first set foot within, unchanging and unyielding to the tides of time. Nestled into the lush, green mountains and veiled by thick plumes of mist that rose from rivers, the school might have been part of a different world—one unaffected by the lives and deaths of emperors, the rise and fall of dynasties, the eternal spin of sun and stars overhead.
Zen had woken on a kàng platform bed, in what he recognized as the back room to the Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts, the main hall of the School of the White Pines and the favored meditation chamber of the grandmaster. Fretwork ran beneath the eaves of the roof; the chamber was utterly open to the elements but for bamboo blinds drifting gently in the wind between rosewood pillars. From outside came the sound of running water and birdsong. It was afternoon, sunlight falling across the landscape in golden drops.
Someone had stabilized his qì; his head was clear, and thehorrifying experience of the yin energy, the echoing voice in his head, seemed like a dream from a distant time. He was still weak—it would take at least a day of rest and meditation for him to recover—but he could function. Zen had bathed and changed into the flowing páo and clean boots set out for him by the bed, then gone in search of the grandmaster.
He’d found him walking the paths of the school, white robes swaying to the tune of his steps, face tilted to the serenity of their surroundings. In eleven cycles, Dé’zi, too, seemed to have avoided the corrosive power of time. Zen did not know his age but had the impression that he was somewhere in his forties, old enough to be a father figure. His once-jet-black hair was now peppered with gray, yet there was a calming pleasantness to his face that might have been described as handsome.
If Zen thought of himself as fire, then Dé’ziwas water: smooth-flowing and gentle yet capable of surging storms, clear on the surface yet with depths unseen. After eleven cycles, Zen had yet to see to the bottom of his master.
Now Dé’zicut through the air with the fluidity of a blade, carrying that same, inscrutable half smile. The sash at his waist bore the sigil of the school—a white jagged Hin pine against a black circle—and conferred his status as grandmaster.
“Ah,” he said. “Zen.”
Zen pressed a fist to his palm and inclined his head in a salute. “Shi’fù.” There was so much he needed to relay—the girl, Haak’gong, the magician, and the Elantians in the Central Plains—but Zen kept silent, waiting, as was customary, for his master to speak. There was no telling where Dé’ziwould take the conversation.
The grandmaster was silent for a while, studying a bush of snow camellias. Zen tamped down his impatience. He had theimpression that the world could be ending and he would still find his master strolling through the vegetation of Skies’ End with a cup of fermented pu’er tea.
“You have the look of a lover in mourning.”
Zen started. “Sh-shi’fù?”
