A Long, Kind Talk

I did not go to Daejin's rooms to kill him.

I want that on the record, because of what Seoljeong said to me later, and because of what came through the window. I went to my cousin's rooms that night to have the long, kind talk he had promised me, and to find out exactly how a Demon Cult thread had come to be braided into the qi of a junior Iron Mountain disciple thirty years before the Cult was supposed to exist. Killing him would have been simple, in the sense that lifting a mountain is simple if you happen to be a mountain. I was a damp radish. I could not lift a mug of tea twice without resting.

So I went to talk.

I waited until the household slept. I counted the watch by the sound of the night cook banking the kitchen fire, which in this house happened at the same hour every night because the night cook was a man of habit and the third son had spent a soft, forgotten boyhood learning the habits of everyone who was kind to him. I took the back stairs. Eleven of them. They hurt less now. The body was learning the shape of where it was weakest, which is the only thing a weak body is good for, knowing precisely how weak it is.

I brought Seoljeong. Of course I brought Seoljeong. He would have sulked for a week otherwise.

"This is a poor plan," the sword murmured at my hip, as I crossed the dark of the inner court. "He is stronger than you. He is faster than you. He has a thread on him that I do not like the smell of, and I have smelled a great many threads. If he decides to kill you, I can turn one cut. Perhaps two. After that you are a boy in a nightshirt with a clever sword and no breath."

"I know."

"Then why."

"Because in my last life I never asked any of them why," I said. "I spent the whole war killing the Cult, and I never once sat down with one of them before the end and asked how it started. I assumed I knew. I was the Sword Saint. I assumed a great many things. Then they poured me wine." I put my hand to the lacquered door of Daejin's apartments, where a thin line of lamplight showed beneath. "This time I would like to ask the question while the answer can still change something."

I went in.

Daejin was awake, which I had expected, and dressed, which I had not. He sat at a low table with a single lamp and two cups already poured, and he smiled at me with all of his careful teeth, and he did not look like a young man who had been waiting up nervously. He looked like a man keeping an appointment.

"Little Garam," he said. "You brought the letter-opener."

"You asked me to."

"I did." He gestured at the cup across from him. "Sit. Drink. We are going to have a long, kind talk, you and I."

I did not drink. Seven smiling sects had taught me, in another life, exactly what a freely poured cup can hold. I knew the etiquette of poured cups in rooms like this.

"Tell me about the thread," I said.

Daejin's smile did not move, but something behind it did, the way a still pond shows you the fish only when the fish has already decided to be seen.

"What thread," he said pleasantly.

"The one braided through your qi. Three strands. A cipher knot. Inner-court work. You wear it the way a man wears a wedding ring he has stopped noticing." I sat, finally, but not where he had set the cup. I sat at the corner of the table, where I could see the door and the window both, the way forty years of being hunted teaches a man to sit. "I am going to guess, cousin, and you are going to tell me how close I am. Someone came to you at the Iron Mountain Sect. Not a master. A guest. Soft-spoken. They found you when you were angry about something small, the way young men are always angry about something small. They offered you a thread. They said it would make you stronger faster than the sect ever would. They were right. It did. And it cost you nothing, at first, which is how you know it will cost you everything later."

The lamp flame stood very straight.

"You have been reading my father's sold books after all," Daejin said softly.

"There are no sword books in your father's library, cousin. You told me that yourself this morning."

He laughed, once, a real one, surprised out of him, and for a moment he was only twenty years old and clever and lonely in a house that valued him for the wrong things. Then the moment closed, the way a door closes when someone on the other side decides you have seen enough of the room.

"You are not Garam," Daejin said.

It was not a question. I had been waiting for it since the wood-shed.

"No," I said.

"I felt it this morning. When the envoy put his fingers on your blade and your sword did that clever, ugly little thing with his qi. Garam could not do that. Garam fainted at blood. Garam called the dog by his own name back when the dog was a puppy, because he thought it was funny, because he was the only one in this house who was ever gentle with anything." Daejin's eyes had gone flat and bright. "So. Who are you, in my cousin's soft body. A ghost. A possessing thing. A cultivator who burned out his own meridians and stole a child to start again."

"Does it matter."

"It matters to the thread," Daejin said.

And the thread answered him.

I felt it before I saw it. The temperature of the room dropped, not the gentle cold of Seoljeong's frost, which is a clean cold, a winter-morning cold, but a wet, low, intimate cold, the cold of a cellar where something has been kept too long. The three strands braided through Daejin's qi unwound themselves, very slowly, and rose off his skin, and his eyes, which had been bright, went dark at the centre, the pupil swallowing the colour, and when he spoke again it was not Daejin's voice on top of Daejin's voice. It was something using his mouth the way I was using Garam's.

"Frost Resolve," it said.

Seoljeong went rigid against my hip. I have carried that sword across two lifetimes and I have felt him afraid exactly twice. This was the second.

"We know that blade," the thing in my cousin said, with my cousin's lips, in a voice like a cellar door. "We know that cold. We poured the wine for the man who carried it. We watched him drink." The dark eyes found me, and the smile that spread across Daejin's face was not Daejin's at all. "Hello, Saint. You are early. You are small. You are a radish in a nightshirt. But you are early, and that is very interesting, because we are not supposed to be here yet either, and we did so wonder who else had come back."

The lamp went out.

In the dark, Seoljeong's blade lit pale and cold in my hand, half-drawn before I had decided to draw it, and the thing wearing my cousin rose from the low table without seeming to stand, and somewhere across the sleeping house a maid named Sori was hiding a jade bead in her hair because a dead man had told her to, and the whole careful plan of my second life folded up in my chest like a letter I would not get to finish reading.

"Radish-judge," I breathed.

"I am here, Master." No irony. Pure winter. "I am here. Cut first this time. Ask your questions of whatever is left."

The cellar-cold flooded the room, and I cut.