"You did not drag a hundred and fifty bodies up a mountain to stand around admiring my night’s work."
Ren’s mouth curved with dry humor. "No, though I will grant the work is worth a look." His gaze moved across the slope, the mine, the bodies being cleared from the entrance. "We rebuild, Young Master. That is the long and short of it. Every soul I marched up that track is here to put this place back into running order. Both pits, the shafts, the hoists, the drainage, the timbering, all of it. Two years we watched Skyedge slide while the stone money that kept our gates upright drained into Blood Fang’s purse. That bleeding stops today."
"And once the mines run?"
"Then the sect will breathe again thankfully. Outer halls get repairs. Disciples stop leaving because their stipends arrive late. The forges stop rationing tal like beggars sharing rice. We pay old debts, reopen old roads, and remind the valley families that Skyedge is not a dying house with pretty banners." Elder Ren glanced toward the mine mouth. "It will not happen in one day. But today is the first day in two years that the road points upward."
Xuan looked toward the dark opening. "And the vein at the bottom? That is not so common ore."
"No. It is not" A knowing glint touched Ren’s eyes. "The ordinary ore feeds the sect, sold and slted and turned to silver to patch the holes in our treasury. The deeper vein we keep, and we keep quiet about keeping it. There are forges at Skyedge that have waited a very long ti for stone of that grade, and a blade or two that would drink it gladly."
His glance dipped briefly to the sword at Xuan’s hip.
Xuan let the corner of his mouth answer for him. "Furnaces are a conversation for another day. But there is more than rock down there worth carrying ho. We stripped records from the overseer’s office. Nas, routes, paynts, a decent picture of who Blood Fang answers to and what they have been moving through these hills. My father is reading the ugliest of it now."
Ren listened without breaking in. When Xuan finished, the old elder held quiet for a beat, studying him with those eyes the way he had on the morning he found a cursed boy standing on legs that should not have held him.
"You carry a head older than the body it sits behind, Young Master. I have thought so since the day you stood up out of that bed." His empty sleeve stirred in the mountain wind. "Let say a thing plainly, since I am old enough to skip the ribbon and you are clever enough to see through it anyway. These last months, since the day you ca back to us, this sect has been finding its feet again. Step by step. We have gained more from you in a single season than we allowed ourselves to hope for in years."
Xuan said nothing so Ren went on.
"Your father walked out of the capital with his life because of the na you carved at the tournant. That sa na has put him back across tables he had been barred from, speaking terms with houses that would not have opened his letters a year ago. Frostmoon among them. Their people will be riding to Skyedge before long, to set an accord between our two houses down in ink."
"The marriage one?"
A laugh escaped the old elder, surprised out of him. He dragged his good hand down through his beard.
"Ah. That one." His eyes ward. "That part is yours to settle, and the girl’s, and no one else’s. Su Han is keen on it, I will not pretend otherwise. The man wants a strong, gifted son-in-law to brace his line through the years coming, and I would wager he fixed his eye on you the mont he saw you in the tournant. But the accord does not hang on a wedding alone. Two sects clasping hands against an uncertain season, that is the at of it. The marriage is a door left standing open, not a bill co due. Whether you walk through it is between you and Frostmoon’s daughter. I would not presu to push you at it."
Xuan held his face level while the Earth-born corner of him reeled at the smoothness of the turn, from gutting a mine full of n one breath to discussing his hand in wedlock the next, both over the sa field of cooling bodies.
There would be ti enough to wrestle with Frostmoon and its daughter when she stood in front of him. For now there was a mine that no longer needed his sword and a sect that did.
"I will leave the rebuilding to better hands than mine, Elder. My father will want to see the first beams set himself, and I am no mason." He tipped his head toward the path. "I am going ho. There is work waiting at Skyedge that will not sit patiently, and I have leaned on this mountain as long as it will hold ."
Ren dipped his head, respect plain as morning. "Go on, then. The road is quieter than it was a day ago, and you are the reason for it. Rest when you reach the end of it, if you still rember how the trick is done."
"I will consider pretending."
"That is more than I expected."
Xuan called for Kai. When his stepbrother climbed back out of the dark with their father’s leave, the edge in him had been worn down to sothing near peace. Wei Tianming fell in half a pace behind them, still pale, still tired, still alive.
Lin Zhen remained at the mine mouth with Elder Ren at his shoulder, the two older n watching the young master start down the mountain toward the sect he had dragged back from the lip of ruin in the span of one long, bloody night.
Two thoughts kept easy stride with Xuan as he walked.
One was a na from a dead woman’s letters, coiled and waiting to be drawn.
The other was an old man with a centipede sleeping in his skull, sowhere high in the mountains where no Skyedge scout would stumble across him before Xuan decided what use to make of him.
Frostmoon was riding his way. War was riding toward everyone. And for the first ti since he had opened his eyes in a cripple’s borrowed body, Lin Xuan was walking ho out in front of it all, rather than dragging himself behind.
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