Chapter 964 — The Arm

CHAPTER 964

The Arm

“Don’t move,” Ye Wanqiu said. “If you move, I’ll have to start again from the fingers.”

Shi Feng sat on a stool in Snowpine Court’s furnace room with his frozen arm in a basin of hot water. Fire-Cloud Grass floated on top of it, and the steam smelled of ginger. Elder Ye Wanqiu sat in front of him with two fingers laid against the inside of his elbow, feeding warm qi into the arm a thread at a time.

The frost came out of his skin slowly. Where it came out, the arm turned from white to grey, and from grey to an angry red, and the red hurt more than the white had.

“It hurts more now than it did on the terrace,” Shi Feng said.

“Of course it does,” Ye Wanqiu said dryly. “On the terrace it was dead. Now it’s coming back to life and complaining. Be grateful it’s complaining.”

“I’m grateful, Elder Ye,” Shi Feng said. “Can it complain more quietly?”

“No,” Ye Wanqiu said.

Qin Wuyan stood silently in the doorway. He’d watched for an hour and seemed ready to watch another.

Ye Wanqiu moved her fingers up to his shoulder. The cold there was the deepest, packed in around the joint, and she had to go slowly. For a while the only sounds were the brazier and the water.

“You did a stupid thing,” Ye Wanqiu said at last. “Swallowing her frost. Any physician on this mountain would tell you that.”

“It was that or let the screen break,” Shi Feng said. “If the screen broke, the frost would have hit me all at once instead of a little at a time. This way it only took the arm.”

“Only the arm,” Ye Wanqiu repeated. “Listen to him.”

She worked silently for a while, then spoke more seriously.

“I’ll tell you two things, and then you can forget I said them,” Ye Wanqiu said. “First, Lanting won’t forgive the terrace. Not because her disciple lost. Ruoshuang lost honestly, and Lanting knows it. She won’t forgive you because Senior Qin stood up in front of the whole sect and showed everyone she’d leaked her pressure. That’s her face, and you’re the reason it’s gone.”

“I didn’t ask Senior Qin to stand,” Shi Feng said.

“It doesn’t matter who asked,” Ye Wanqiu said, annoyed. “You won while everyone watched her cheat. She’ll blame you for the humiliation. Don’t expect her to be reasonable about it.”

“And the second thing?” Shi Feng asked.

“Kong Shuhe’s side,” Ye Wanqiu said. “Before the pill, only Kong himself called you the Grand Elder’s man, and quietly. From today his whole side will say it out loud. You made the Grand Elder’s pill, he sealed your gate, he paid you before the hall and said the hall owes you courtesy. Then Lanting’s disciple lost to you on the terrace. Anyone who wants to fight the Grand Elder in the elders’ hall now has a reason to fight you too.”

Shi Feng stopped smiling.

He didn’t mind being anybody’s enemy. He minded being somebody’s piece. If Elder Kong’s faction called him the Grand Elder’s man, then sooner or later someone would say that the pill had been a payment. And if the pill was a payment, they’d ask what it had paid for, and the answer every one of them would give was the enquiry.

“They’ll say I bought something,” Shi Feng said.

“They’ll say you tried to,” Ye Wanqiu said. “Which is worse. If you’d bought it, at least you’d have it.”

The door of the courtyard opened.

Shen Yaoqing came in with a lacquered medicine box in one hand and a rolled record in the other. Snow covered the shoulders of her formal white robe. She bowed to her master first, then to the guest.

“Fire-Marrow Salve from the medicine hall,” Shen Yaoqing said, setting the box on the table. “Three applications a day for five days. The medicine hall says it’s their best. As host, I asked for the best.”

“Thank you, Chief Disciple,” Shi Feng said.

“And the outer hall’s record of the exchange,” Shen Yaoqing said, unrolling it. “The guest has the right to hear it before it’s sealed. I wrote it.”

She read it aloud without any expression at all.

“First exchange, no blood. Second exchange, no blood. Third exchange, first blood to the guest’s chest. Not called. Senior Qin Wuyan of the Sky Pavilion stood against interference from the elders’ step. The guest won by a stroke stopped at the throat. Bai Ruoshuang conceded and bowed,” Shen Yaoqing read.

Ye Wanqiu looked up sharply.

“You wrote ‘not called’,” Ye Wanqiu said.

“It wasn’t called, Master,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“Lanting will read that,” Ye Wanqiu said.

“Then Elder Jing will read what happened,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly. “The record is the outer hall’s, not hers. If the record says something false, the next guest who stands on that terrace has no reason to trust it.”

She rolled it up again and looked at Shi Feng.

“The exchange was unfair,” Shen Yaoqing told Shi Feng. “The record won’t hide that. You have my word as chief disciple.”

She bowed and left. The door closed behind her.

Ye Wanqiu looked at the closed door for a moment. Then she went back to his shoulder.

“My disciple,” Ye Wanqiu said, and for once she sounded a little proud of it.

By dusk the arm was red from fingertip to shoulder, and he could make a fist with it, slowly. Ye Wanqiu wiped her hands, told him to keep it out of the cold for three days, and that if he ate any more frost she wouldn’t come back to thaw him.

A runner in outer-hall white came to the gate just as she was leaving. The Grand Elder asked the honoured guest to come to the outer hall in the morning. He had something to offer him.