Chapter 1061 — Matron Yue

CHAPTER 1061

Matron Yue

She came down the path from the eighth peak alone, in plain grey, and the snow didn’t seem to touch her.

By the time she reached the outer hall, half the mountain had seen her. Disciples stopped sweeping. A pair of outer elders on the terrace stepped aside and bowed, and she didn’t look at them. She walked straight through the outer hall’s courtyard to the gate of Snowpine Court and stopped there.

She was an old woman, small and straight-backed, with her grey hair pinned up with a single bone hairpin. Her eyes were the colour of old iron. Shi Feng had last seen her up close from the outer bench of a carriage in the rain, with his face wrapped in grey cloth, and before that he’d seen almost nothing at all.

He came out of the furnace room and bowed.

“Senior,” Shi Feng said.

Matron Yue looked at him for a while. Then she spoke.

“Shi Feng,” Matron Yue said.

She paused. It was one breath too long, exactly as it had been at Willow Ford, when she’d said the same two words and then told him it was nothing.

This time she didn’t say it was nothing. She didn’t say anything for a moment.

Shen Yaoqing had come into the courtyard behind her, quickly, still fastening her sword. She stopped three paces away and bowed low, lower than she’d bowed to the Grand Elder.

“Senior Yue,” Shen Yaoqing said. “The outer hall wasn’t told you were coming down. If I’d known, I’d have—”

“You’d have swept the path,” Matron Yue said. “It didn’t need sweeping.” She didn’t look round. Her eyes were still on Shi Feng. “The claim was read. He’s to come up.”

The courtyard went silent. Two junior disciples who had stopped at the gate to stare looked at each other.

“It came back?” one whispered. “It didn’t come back burned?”

“It didn’t come back at all, idiot. She did.”

Shen Yaoqing’s face didn’t move, but she straightened slowly from her bow. Shi Feng saw her glance once at the eighth peak, then at him. She said nothing.

“Read by whom, Senior?” Shi Feng asked.

Matron Yue didn’t answer that.

“The Tianji Mansion’s Master fell,” Matron Yue said instead. “Half a month ago. He cast something on the old plate, and the plate cracked, and his hair went white in the time it takes to boil a kettle. The whole north’s heard it by now. They say he cast it for you.”

“He did,” Shi Feng said.

“For what?” Matron Yue asked.

“For my mother,” Shi Feng said.

Matron Yue’s eyes went to his right hand, still bound at the palm. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at his face, slowly, from his brow to his jaw and back again.

“You look like someone,” Matron Yue said. “Long ago.”

Shi Feng kept very still.

“Who?” Shi Feng asked.

Matron Yue didn’t answer. Her iron-coloured eyes stayed on his face a moment longer. Then she looked away.

“Don’t ask them again,” Matron Yue said. “The Mansion. Don’t ask them again.”

“Senior—” Shi Feng began, wanting to ask whom she remembered.

“I’ve said what I’m going to say,” Matron Yue said, and turned away. “Come up.”

Shi Feng stood there for a breath longer. Shi Feng was frustrated. Her recognition might be the first real clue about his mother, but Matron Yue had already refused to explain. If he pushed, she’d simply walk back up the path alone, and the claim would be finished.

He wouldn’t lose the meeting with Nangong Xiuyi by arguing now. He would remember the warning and the way Matron Yue had studied his face.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan had come to the door of his room. He looked at the old woman, and the old woman glanced at him once, and something passed between two people who had both stood guard for a long time.

“This one waits here,” Qin Wuyan said.

“The host stays too,” Matron Yue said, without turning round.

Shen Yaoqing bowed again.

“As Senior wishes,” Shen Yaoqing said. Then, to Shi Feng, in the same cold, correct voice: “The rules of the outer hall don’t cover the eighth peak, Master Shi. I can’t tell you any of them. I’ve never been up.”

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said.

He followed Matron Yue out of Snowpine Court’s gate.

The mountain watched them go. Disciples stood along the paths and didn’t pretend to be doing anything else. At the outer hall’s edge, Grand Elder Zuo Chengjian stood at a window with his hands behind his back. Elder Kong Shuhe stood beside him, and neither of them spoke.

“A frontier boy, walking up the eighth peak!”

“Behind Senior Yue! Nobody walks behind Senior Yue!”

“I’ve been on this mountain thirty years. I’ve never seen anyone go up.”

“The sun’s come up in the west today.”

“…”

At the foot of the eighth peak there was no path. There was only the rock, steep and grey and bare, rising out of the snowfield. Not one flake of snow lay on it.

Matron Yue walked straight up the bare rock, and wherever her foot came down, a step was there.

Shi Feng looked down at the first step, then up at the small grey back climbing ahead of him.

He started to climb.